Episode 22 - Insider Interview Transcript
Insider Interview transcript
Host: emmagrant01
Guest: pinkfinity
Emma: This is the insider interview for slashcast episode 22. I am Emma Grant, and today in our Deathly Hallows 2-a-palooza episode, we are talking to Heidi. Heidi from FictionAlley and HPEF, who's had an incredibly exciting last few weeks, and we're just going to ask her about how this all happened, how this came about. How did you come to this fandom? How did you come to fandom in general? And then, how did you find your way to the Harry Potter fandom?
Heidi: I actually got my first email account on something called America OnLine, which was this little tiny company out of VA that had this this red brick building and I was in law school in Washington, and I got an email account in 1992. And in my first 9 years on the internet, I was mostly in a couple of small-ish music fandoms. Everything but the girl, crowded house, a few other things. And in the crowded house fandom, I did a bit of moderator work for one of the forums, and I was in law school at the time, so I did - I actually moderated the first cyberspace law board on America OnLine, circa '93-'95. But it wasn't really until I read an article in the Washington post in the summer of 2000, basically the day before Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire came out, that I thought about getting into any sort of book-related fandom. There were of course no movies at that point, no one had even been cast. They mentioned this Harry Potter yahoo club , this harry potter for grown ups. And I was like, "oh my god that sounds perrrrrfeeeeect."
Emma: [laughs] I remember that!
Heidi: But Google didn't really exist back then, and yahoo search engine was pretty atrocious at trying to find things, so it took me over two and a half hours to find this yahoo club. Of course, the next day, everybody had the book on the same day, everybody was reading it and talking about it - we didn't use spoiler tags. We didn't use 'oh my god, you know, spoiler notifications' in the subject, we didn't anything. It was just all talk talk talk talk talk, oh my god, who's this - Cedric's back and he's dead and Voldemort's back, and who's this Barty Crouch Jr guy anyway, and we had no idea about David Tennant back then. Um. And about two weeks later, the whole time people had been talking about fanfiction. And I was aware about what fanfic was, but I had never actually read any online fanfic, although believe me, I read a lot of what would be called RPF fanfic involving historical figures - it's one of my favorite tropes and genres in, you know, published novel reading. But I'd never read any fanfic. And people were like, "oh, if you can't wait for the next book, my god, we're going to have to wait for another year. You're going to have to read Paradigm of Uncertainty. You should read Call of the Wild. And I did .Those were the first two fanfics I ever read. Paradigm of Uncertainty was Laurie's story that had started long before GoF came out, and it was amazing. It's still up on FictionAlley, so you can go back and read it and sort of see what people were surmising and supposing about where the story would go, and it was fascinating. And then Call of the Wild is the massive Remus backstory pre-Goblet of Fire. I mean, it's so fantastic. He's off in Romania and he's hunting vampires and it's just absolutely brilliant. And I think there was the interlude where Gilderoy shows up and steals his stories and wipes his memories. And then how he ends up back in the UK right before Prisoner of Azkaban starts and that's when Dumbledore goes and asks him to sort of be there for Harry. And those were the first two stories I read, and I just sort of got obsessively into it and started reading more and more stories. And new things were being posted every day. That was back when, my gosh, there were 30 or 40 new chapters being posted on fanfiction.net per day and you could read all of them.
Emma: So this was like the beginning of what they call the long summer, right?
Heidi: Yes, the three year summer of doom.
Emma: At what point did you realize that there was more than just - that there was fanfiction that kind of went beyond expanding the story a little bit? Wink wink, nudge nudge
Heidi: Well honestly, Paradigm of Uncertainty - Justin Finch-Fletchley is gay in that story. So you could say that the first fanfic I ever read had slash in it. I mean, it's mild snogging with random OCs, but still, its there. And I think that was the very first fanfic, or at least the very first Harry Potter fanfic that ever got written up in Salon magazine. So from the very, very start, the mainstream media was not focusing on you know, Harry Potter fanfic written for 12 and 13 year olds, where Pikachu and Ash go to Hogwarts, and believe me, there were a lot of them. And there were already focusing on grown-ups who were writing these stories and taking them well, well well beyond the maturity level that we had seen through the first three books, and really through the fourth book as well. The first story that I read that was more than an R rating was probably Grimslasher's Boys Own Camping Adventure. I read stories that, you know, had discussed Remus/Sirius before that, but I think that was the first time that I read a "how they got together" story. I mean, it was just fantastic, it's probably still one of my all-time favorite fics.
Emma: Well, I've heard of that one but I haven't read it. But we'll link to all these things you're mentioning in the post-show post, so people can check them out for themselves. Some of the really old old-school stuff. So then, at what point did you get involved in FictionAlley
Heidi: Well, I was one of the dozen or so people who founded it. Back in, oh god, February or March of 2001, Harry Potter for Grownups decided to stop allowing discussion of fanfic on the main list, and split off into three lists. Before that you could discuss pretty much any Harry Potter-relate topic on the main list. So, at that point, fanfiction was splintered off into another list. There were a lot of Yahoo groups for fanfic at that point. At that point, Yahoo Groups were a place to archive your fic.
Emma: Right, right
Heidi: Because it was free, and if you wanted webspace that wasn't anywhere that was completely ad-riddled, like GeoCities, then you needed to basically use a Yahoo group. And Fanfiction.net was fine, and a lot of people put their stuff there, but they had some massive amounts of downtime in the spring of 2001. And there were server issues and things like that, and people just couldn't upload their stories when they wanted to, or edit it when they wanted to, so like being on a Yahoo group, you had a little bit more control. But even a Yahoo group, because even of the limitation of the size- of the number of files and the size of the files, and the way it was moderated and things like that, nobody really felt like that was a permanent solution. So there was talk all through the spring about setting up a website that would host fanfiction. So we took control of our own place, and we started uploading stories all through the month of July, launched it with the novels-focus section, Schnoogle, almost exactly ten years ago this week. And about two or three weeks later, the other - once that had basically been tested and it was working, we set up another three sites to host - Riddikulus, for humorous fics, Astronomy Tower for anything that was romantic, because the trope at that point was that every character went up to the Astronomy Tower to snog somebody else.
Emma: [laughs] I remember that!
Heidi: And The Dark Arts for anything that was dramatic or angsty or mysterious - basically it was the catch-all category. And then we went live with FictionAlley Park, also in August of 2001, and it was getting a lot of traffic basically from the very start.
Emma: I love that we're talking so much about the history of fanfiction in this fandom as well as - we're working our way up to the movie premiere.
Heidi: Well, one of the unique things FictionAlley was doing was we would host fics no matter what the ship, or no matter who the character. All it had to do was take place in the Wizarding world, or in an AU of the Wizarding world. And that was something that no site other than fanfiction.net was doing
Emma: Oh, that's right, because the Sugar Quill was around at that time as well, wasn't it?
Heidi: Yeah, they had gone live February or March, maybe January, possibly earlier, and there were other sites. There was a girl named Eliza Dyonus Snape [?], and she would archive stories that were Snape-centric as long as they were het or gen and PG rated. And there were other people who would put together lists or even host stories on their own webspace, that were ship-specific or character-specific. But like I said, we didn't really have a fantastic Google search engine back then, I mean, Google existed, but it wasn't that great, so it was hard to find things unless everything was in the same place. And you know, that was also the early days of LiveJournal. That really wasn't thought of at that point as a place to archive your stories, although it was certainly a place to talk about them
Emma: Right, and I also remember the importance of it - I was in a different fandom at that time, but I remember the importance of archives then, and just being able to find things. And if you had something that you were looking for, that was even remotely, let's say, controversial, and if you were looking - the fandom I was in, chan was a big thing, um or RPF was just almost unallowed at the time, and so at the time there were mailing lists where people would say, you know, "you can't have this; you can't have that," and it's very different from the culture we have today, which I would say is mostly livejournal based, and really everything goes. And we've almost gone completely in the other direction, where before, you know, there were these archives and lists that were very specific about what was allowed and what was not, and now you're [not even really allowed to] criticize somebody else's ideas about what should be in fic. It's fascinating, what's happened in the last couple of years.
Heidi: It is, and if you go back through some of the posts on fictionalley from, um, I think 2004, we had a couple of the long time FictionAlley users who decided that we shouldn't be hosting any fics that contained bestiality, intergenerational ships, or underaged ships. Basically we got into a debate with some of the users who wanted us to bad all of these things because they felt it was unbecoming for their stories to be hosted on a site that hosted such illicit and atrocious topics. Obviously we took the American Library Association position that, as long as a story had an accurate summery, you know, the same way that books should have their content summarized on a flyleaf or on the back so that people know what a story is about in vague terms, that we weren't going to ban any topics or any discussions as concepts from FictionAlley, you know, we were going to continue our position of hosting everything, you know, as long as the grammar and spelling was reasonably okay. There's probably 250 posts on that thread, just it's a really interesting sort of slice of discussion within fandom circa that time. I mean, there are still some people who are anti-slash as a concept, but I think at this point, you'd be very very hard-pressed for somebody to say, and actually believe that, you know, there are no gay wizards. But in 2001 and 2002 and 2005, and pretty much until JK Rowling put it out there that Dumbledore had been in love with Grindelwald, there were people who still said that there were no gay wizards. It's very frustrating, obviously, to try and argue with people who believe that way, because they're obviously opposing their own personal beliefs on something. And when you've got, you know, wonderful quotes from JK Rowling extoling the virtues of Lolita, it's very very difficult to say, no she wouldn't approve of any of her characters engaged in any sort of sexual situations. Or at least, be okay with the fact that other people are writing about it. It's not like anyone is asking her to read it.
Emma: True. Nor do we want her to, necessarily. So we've talked a lot about your background in the Harry Potter fandom, and a lot about the history of the fandom as we've gone along, so I want to fast forward a little bit and talk about the premiere of the Deathly Hallows 2 move in London which you were at - were you representing FictionAlley or HPEF or were you just there? How did it happen?
Heidi: I've been to premieres before for harry potter both in New York for Prisoner of Azkaban and Half Blood Prince and the first Deathly Hallows, and in Los Angeles for Order of the Phoenix. But London was just an unbelievably different experience. Every time in the states, yes, there have been crowds on the streets, and the cast members have always gone over and chatted with people, and it's been an intense experience being among the other fansites and getting to interview the cast members and the script writers and the producers and the directors every time. But this was just a different, this was a festival, this was, you know, PotterFest, Potterbury - because people were comparing it to Glastonbury - in the middle of London on a day that started out with heavy miserable downpours, and ended up being the first Harry Potter premiere probably ever that was just complete sunshine, that was absolutely a gorgeous and glowing warm day.
Emma: So first of all, everybody who was following you on twitter that day was just insanely jealous of everyone who was there. But so you were really on the red carpet. Can you tell us a little bit about what kinds of experiences you had that day?
Heidi: Well, Warner Bros has been kind and generous enough to invite fansites to be part of the red carpet going all the way back to Prisoner of Azkaban at Radio City Music Hall in New York, although at that time, none of us had any idea what we were doing. We've gotten a lot more professional about it. Basically, the red carpet line is sort of a pen on one side of the carpet, and cast members and various other random celebrities come over and they talk to you. The cast members are usually brought by by a publicist, and some of the famous people just wander over on their own. Also see Darren Criss twice. Basically at London it was different, because the cast members were coming up from the stage that was in Trafalgar Square. That's the cast members and the producers and J. K. Rowling. So the got to come first past onto the stage, where they did a Q & A with some British journalist, the name of who is escaping me. And then they would walk down past the fans who were lining both sides of the red carpet. Some of them had amazing art. I mean, there were pictures of Dobby, there were thank-you notes to J. K. Rowling, there were people with Support Dumbledore rainbow flags, there were people with I've Always Believed in Snape banners, every fan trope that you could possibly expect, people had on signs or on t-shirts or on little posters that they were waving in the air. And getting to speak to some of the fans who had been camped out there for five, six, seven days was unbelievable. Their love of the books and their love of the movies and their love of the fandom was really what brought all those thousands of people there that day. That was fantastic and amazing. Then we were up in the press pens watching the fans on the other side and waiting for the various cast members to come by. And the first one who came by this time was Jason Issacs, who is the person that I have been waiting to talk to for years.
Emma: Oh my gosh
Heidi: Mostly because I absolutely love his perspective on Lucius Malfoy and the entire family. Some of the interviews he's done this year give you such insight as to why he played Lucius that way, and I think for a lot of people who came to fandom from the movies, or who read the books after seeing Chamber of Secrets, it's a very different perspective than people who had read the books before the movies were cast and before they started coming out. And I wanted to have a chance to ask him about that, and you know, he spoke just a little bit about how Lucius's story had not turned out the way that he had anticipated, that it was an absolutely fantastic twist that had Lucius doing time in prison and becoming an alcoholic and completely broken as a man and having to sort of put aside the dreams he had for his son to be this great shining light unto the Wizarding world because of Harry and because of Voldemort and of how his entire perspective of himself has to change. You know, he gave us probably four or five minutes of his time, which doesn't sound like a lot. But given that we were right next to Warner Bros and the BBC and other people who were also clamoring to talk to him, it was just a fantastic exchange and a fantastic interlude, and we were really grateful for it and he is so fantastic. And you know, also, Tom Felton is, always has been so forthcoming to fans and to fansites. I mean, he's one of the few cast members who's gone to DragonCon and come back, and he's coming back again this year
Emma: And gone again.
Heidi: And gone again, yeah. And he's just always a complete sweetheart. Then we got to talk with the directors and the producers, and you know, it's just fantastic to be able to spend time connecting with people. The unexpected part was that we had been given a list of cast members and other celebs who were going to be there, but then there were a lot of cast members who were not on the list, who didn't come down through the stage. And that includes the girl who plays Lavender, Devon Murray who plays Seamus, Alfie Enoch who plays Dean, and they came and chatted with us as well, and because they weren't on the list, nobody further down knew about them, they really didn't have as many demands on their time, so we got to spend a lot more time talking with them.
Emma: And then after that, you went on to Leaky Con, Right?
Heidi: Yes! Yes, I came home for almost a day and a half.
Emma: Were you just there as a fan, or were you working there as well?
Heidi: Well, I did a vid show, but no. Other than that, I was just enjoying myself, seeing friends, hanging out - I had a very mellow time.
Emma: And then after that, you went to ComiCon. So I mean, this went on and on and on.
Heidi: Yeah, it's been a crazy couple of weeks. I left LeakyCon on Sunday afternoon, and Wednesday morning, I flew off to ComiCon. We have our Harry Potter panel that we've been doing for the last four years. Originally, back in 208 and 2009, it was organized and moderated by a young man named Eric Bolling from San Diego, who unfortunately passed away the day after Christmas of 2009. We all still really miss him, because he is the reason why the Harry Potter panel is a part of ComiCon. And then last year, I organized it, but after Infinitus, I was sick and exhausted and I wasn't able to do the moderator duties. So Melissa and Ellie bravely stepped in for me at the last minute and did it. And then this year I did the organization and moderation of it, and I think we put together a pretty interesting panel. Every year we try to incorporate different elements of fandom. We wanted to have people from the news sites, from the fanfic side of things - that's me - we invited the International Quidditch Association this time, Andrew Slack from the HP Alliance who is now also branching off into a multifandom project called Imagine Better. Last year, we invited Darren Criss
Emma: And what an interesting year he's had.
Heidi: Gosh, what a year he's had! Last year, Darren and Melissa and initially me, until I knew I wasn't coming at all, were all kind of cranky because the Harry Potter panel was at the same time as the Glee panel.
Emma: [laughs]
Heidi: So they didn't get to go. But that's okay, because they're going this year.
Emma: Yeah.
Heidi: Yeah. So to, you know, sort of keep on with having someone from the, you know, the musical side of the fandom, this year, since obviously Darren wasn't available, we invited Joey Richter, who plays his best friend, Ron, and we got to talk a little about Starkid and some of the theatrical things that are going on in that realm of fandom. And I think that it was a good mix, because people that were attending the panel hadn't been exposed to, say, the International Quidditch Association, or weren't that familiar with fanfic on the page versus fan creativity in the fan film or fan musical genres. So I think that it was a good mix of discussion. We had plans for about an hour or so of discussion and Q&A from the audience and then about three weeks ago, I saw the first draft of the Thursday schedule of ComiCon when it got posted onto one of the websites, and I noticed that there was a little show that was going to be having its ComiCon debut the same day as our panel. The show is called Awake, and it stars a gentleman named Jason Isaacs. So I sent an email over to Melissa immediately and I was like, "What can we do about this? Is there anything we can do about this?" And she was then speaking with Evanna Lynch about LeakyCon-related things, and mentioned this the day before, or two days before Evanna was going to be going to the continent with Jason to debut Deathly Hallows PR. So. I talked to Melissa, who talked to Evanna, who talked to Jason, who said he wanted to do it, who told Evanna who told Melissa to tell me it might happen. And he was going to see if we could work out the schedule. And then at the premiere - I'd been keeping this a secret for about two weeks - basically when he was leaving the fansite area, I said, "and we'll hope to see you at ComiCon." And he said, "Oh, you're the one who's working on it." And I said, "yes, and if there's anything that you can do with your schedule, we would really appreciate it. And then I show up at ComiCon, and they have his signing for Awake scheduled at the exact same time as our panel. So I [pained?] Melissa, we wibbled a little bit, she says she'll contact him and see what we can do. And he changed his schedule. He told Fox to change the time of the signing so that he could come to our panel for fifteen minutes.
Emma: Oh my gosh. He is so awesome.
Heidi: and to be in that room knowing that he is about to walk in, and hearing people in the audience muttering, "Where's Melissa? Is she still coming?" And to see her walk into the room - and I'm watching the audience - to see her walk into the room and say, "Oh I found a diehard Harry Potter fan wandering the halls, he wanted to come in and say hi," and just the woosh from the crowd when he came in, was just -oh. And he did a great Q&A, he spent about fifteen minutes talking to everybody, and for someone to spend fifteen minutes on anything at ComiCon, especially for someone who's, you know, the lead in a tv show to spend fifteen minutes in a 350 person room - I would say it's unheard of, but it happened earlier that day when some Lost creator showed up at a Lost fan's panel.
Emma: I can only imagine what it would be like to be sitting there and just knowing what's going to be coming, and watching him walk in. That is fantastic. So we all know you have this great love for Harry Potter, but are there other fandoms or other things that you're involved in online besides this stuff that keeps you super busy?
Heidi: You know, the Harry Potter stuff does keep me so busy, I mean, in Supernatural, I've helped moderate on SPN SummerGen, I've been one of the reccers on Crack Impala, and I've been vaguely participatory in other things, you know, there've been a couple, oh god, back in the day of Heroes and things like that. But I think I've just been so busy and so caught up in Harry Potter the last two years that what I really do in other fandoms is vid and read. And those are the two things that I really enjoy doing.
Emma: We're going to wrap this up with some final questions that I ask everybody that I interview. So, what is your favorite fic of all time?
Heidi: I think that my perpetual comfort fic - the one that I go back to if I have a two-hour stretch on an airplane and absolutely nothing is catching my eye - is astolot's Old Country, which is a Supernatural/Harry Potter crossover, and it's just brilliant, the way that, because of course she wrote Harry Potter fanfic back in 2000, maybe even earlier than that, and her take on Harry and Draco is probably one of the first that I read that probably got me to understand how the two of them interplay with each other on so many levels. So to see her writing a story where the Supernatural characters are put into the Harry Potter world right after Deathly Hallows, just, is fantastic and will always be one of my go-to, I will always love these stories.
Emma: What's your favorite piece of fanart?
Heidi: I'm going to have to be really old-school in this, because nothing will ever touch me the way that seeing the first FictionAlley cover, back in early July of 2001, seeing Starling and Pricilla - the stuff that she was doing with Starling back in 2000 is really how I see the characters in my mind when I’m not occasionally thinking of the way that they look in the films.
Emma: What's your OTP? It doesn't have to be Harry Potter, it can be anything.
Heidi: I don't have one OTP. I have, you know, I think I've tried, but there's no way that I can stick to just one. I love Harry/Draco and I always will, and I love Remus and Sirius and I always will. I love Draco and Hermione and I always will. But, you know, when people ask me who my OTP is, I will go sometimes on a very very long discourse as to why Regulus Black and Barty Crouch, Jr are just the perfect pairing to think about and talk about, and everybody agrees that it makes perfect logical sense both within canon and within fandom. So, them, my boys.
Emma: What's the most interesting feedback you've ever gotten for something you've done in fandom?
Heidi: I did a sort of Dr Who/David Tennant wrap-up fanvid in the very very beginning of 2010, set to DJ Earworm's 2009 mashup of the top 25 songs of the year. And I think that that's my fanvid that's gotten the second most number of comments - the first one is Dean Winchester being angsty, which is just a perpetual trope. But it made a lot of people cry, and it made me cry. And going back and watching this video I made eighteen months later still makes me weepy, just because of all the emotions of Tennant leaving, and nobody knew what to expect coming next, and you know, looking back at all his seasons all together, and there's something very very rewarding about hearing that you've touched somebody's emotions and I think that that's probably it.
Emma: Awww. What fic trope is something you almost never get tired of? No matter how horribly clichéd it becomes.
Heidi: I will always have a soft spot for enemies getting closer - enemies becoming friends, or enemies becoming lovers, depending on context. And I think that that's probably one of the reasons why I enjoy Harry and Draco, and why I enjoy Draco and Hermione, because it's just got so much of that going on in there.
Emma: So what pairing have you never written that you've always wanted to try?
Heidi: Uh, either 2002 or 2003, we did a challenge on FictionAlley that was basically write what you'll never write kind of thing? And me and a friend of mine wrote Harry inherits a unicorn farm when Sirius - from his parents that Sirius had been keeping custody of. And Ginny is working there, and it was this extremely - it wasn't [?], it was just this amusing Harry and Ginny story, and I never had thought that I'd be able to write that and, you know, do it credit. Other than that, I think that I've pretty much read at least a paragraph of every pairing that you can come up with, because for a long time, I was coding fics for FictionAlley. And you know, I avoid Hagrid ships as much as possible, because Hagrid in sexual situations with human beings generally squicks me. But there's nothing that I wouldn’t read if it was written creatively and written well.
Emma: And what question do people never ask you that you wish they would?
Heidi: I think that, in terms of questions that I've always wanted to answer, you've really asked a lot of them today. Because there is the people who were in the Harry Potter fandom back in 1999/2000/2001 when things were really just getting started - they all have their own stories to tell about participating and watching how things sort of grew and developed, and it's weird trying to explain to people now, when people are like, well why didn't you put clips from Nimbus up on YouTube? Why didn't you livestream from Lumos? I'm like, we didn't have that kind of thing back then!
Emma: It's like, really, it was usenet. That was what we had. Yeah.
Heidi: Exactly
Emma: That explains…
Heidi: [uphold?] both ways, and we liked it, and so did a showrunner for Dr Who. Who was on usenet back in the 90s, and like, hypothesizing about whether the Doctor was truly married to the TARDIS and what her name would be. And then of course, you know, he has Neil Gaiman write it, and he films it, and it becomes canon! So yes, the days of Usenet, and the days of egroups and yahoo clubs and things like that, are just bizzare to go back and try to explain to people who think that Google has always existed.
Emma: Right, and then you can go back even further to the 'zine days, when people had to like, wait - you had to know somebody that knew somebody who would send you a zine wrapped in brown paper. Oh my gosh - that's something I can't even fathom.
Heidi: I never would have found it back then, because I would have been too shy to ask anyone who possibly could have given me any information about it. I mean, one of the very first things I did when I was using links to browse the world wide web, and use goferspace circa 1993 and 1994, was - I was looking at lists of quotes and theories about Twin Peakes
Emma: Oh, yeah
Heidi: And had there been internet in 1990 and 1991, my God, I would have been all over that. And now you can't stumble over an issue of Entertainment Weekly without reading fandom-generated analysis and bullseyes and comments and things like the International Quidditch Association showing up on the Daily Show. Can you imagine, ten years ago, that could have never happened. Back in 2002, people were absolutely terrified that FictionAlley being mentioned on the front page of the New York Times would spell the end of fandom because the Powers that Be would now know about us and come and smack us down. Well, it's been nine years and that hasn't happened yet, and obviously, given the way things are going, it's never going to. That's a question that people never ask me anymore: do you think the Powers That Be are going to come and shut down all of fandom forever and ever? No. They're not. They like us. Most of the time.
Emma: That's a great point. That's also a really great place to leave it. Thank you so much for taking time out of your super-busy schedule - I think you were home for just a couple of days before you're dashing off on yet another trip.
Heidi: Thank you, Emma.
Emma: And that wraps us up for the Insider Interview for Episode 22. Thanks to Heidi for joining us, and we'll see you next time.
Transcribed by el_em_en_oh_pee
Host: emmagrant01
Guest: pinkfinity
Emma: This is the insider interview for slashcast episode 22. I am Emma Grant, and today in our Deathly Hallows 2-a-palooza episode, we are talking to Heidi. Heidi from FictionAlley and HPEF, who's had an incredibly exciting last few weeks, and we're just going to ask her about how this all happened, how this came about. How did you come to this fandom? How did you come to fandom in general? And then, how did you find your way to the Harry Potter fandom?
Heidi: I actually got my first email account on something called America OnLine, which was this little tiny company out of VA that had this this red brick building and I was in law school in Washington, and I got an email account in 1992. And in my first 9 years on the internet, I was mostly in a couple of small-ish music fandoms. Everything but the girl, crowded house, a few other things. And in the crowded house fandom, I did a bit of moderator work for one of the forums, and I was in law school at the time, so I did - I actually moderated the first cyberspace law board on America OnLine, circa '93-'95. But it wasn't really until I read an article in the Washington post in the summer of 2000, basically the day before Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire came out, that I thought about getting into any sort of book-related fandom. There were of course no movies at that point, no one had even been cast. They mentioned this Harry Potter yahoo club , this harry potter for grown ups. And I was like, "oh my god that sounds perrrrrfeeeeect."
Emma: [laughs] I remember that!
Heidi: But Google didn't really exist back then, and yahoo search engine was pretty atrocious at trying to find things, so it took me over two and a half hours to find this yahoo club. Of course, the next day, everybody had the book on the same day, everybody was reading it and talking about it - we didn't use spoiler tags. We didn't use 'oh my god, you know, spoiler notifications' in the subject, we didn't anything. It was just all talk talk talk talk talk, oh my god, who's this - Cedric's back and he's dead and Voldemort's back, and who's this Barty Crouch Jr guy anyway, and we had no idea about David Tennant back then. Um. And about two weeks later, the whole time people had been talking about fanfiction. And I was aware about what fanfic was, but I had never actually read any online fanfic, although believe me, I read a lot of what would be called RPF fanfic involving historical figures - it's one of my favorite tropes and genres in, you know, published novel reading. But I'd never read any fanfic. And people were like, "oh, if you can't wait for the next book, my god, we're going to have to wait for another year. You're going to have to read Paradigm of Uncertainty. You should read Call of the Wild. And I did .Those were the first two fanfics I ever read. Paradigm of Uncertainty was Laurie's story that had started long before GoF came out, and it was amazing. It's still up on FictionAlley, so you can go back and read it and sort of see what people were surmising and supposing about where the story would go, and it was fascinating. And then Call of the Wild is the massive Remus backstory pre-Goblet of Fire. I mean, it's so fantastic. He's off in Romania and he's hunting vampires and it's just absolutely brilliant. And I think there was the interlude where Gilderoy shows up and steals his stories and wipes his memories. And then how he ends up back in the UK right before Prisoner of Azkaban starts and that's when Dumbledore goes and asks him to sort of be there for Harry. And those were the first two stories I read, and I just sort of got obsessively into it and started reading more and more stories. And new things were being posted every day. That was back when, my gosh, there were 30 or 40 new chapters being posted on fanfiction.net per day and you could read all of them.
Emma: So this was like the beginning of what they call the long summer, right?
Heidi: Yes, the three year summer of doom.
Emma: At what point did you realize that there was more than just - that there was fanfiction that kind of went beyond expanding the story a little bit? Wink wink, nudge nudge
Heidi: Well honestly, Paradigm of Uncertainty - Justin Finch-Fletchley is gay in that story. So you could say that the first fanfic I ever read had slash in it. I mean, it's mild snogging with random OCs, but still, its there. And I think that was the very first fanfic, or at least the very first Harry Potter fanfic that ever got written up in Salon magazine. So from the very, very start, the mainstream media was not focusing on you know, Harry Potter fanfic written for 12 and 13 year olds, where Pikachu and Ash go to Hogwarts, and believe me, there were a lot of them. And there were already focusing on grown-ups who were writing these stories and taking them well, well well beyond the maturity level that we had seen through the first three books, and really through the fourth book as well. The first story that I read that was more than an R rating was probably Grimslasher's Boys Own Camping Adventure. I read stories that, you know, had discussed Remus/Sirius before that, but I think that was the first time that I read a "how they got together" story. I mean, it was just fantastic, it's probably still one of my all-time favorite fics.
Emma: Well, I've heard of that one but I haven't read it. But we'll link to all these things you're mentioning in the post-show post, so people can check them out for themselves. Some of the really old old-school stuff. So then, at what point did you get involved in FictionAlley
Heidi: Well, I was one of the dozen or so people who founded it. Back in, oh god, February or March of 2001, Harry Potter for Grownups decided to stop allowing discussion of fanfic on the main list, and split off into three lists. Before that you could discuss pretty much any Harry Potter-relate topic on the main list. So, at that point, fanfiction was splintered off into another list. There were a lot of Yahoo groups for fanfic at that point. At that point, Yahoo Groups were a place to archive your fic.
Emma: Right, right
Heidi: Because it was free, and if you wanted webspace that wasn't anywhere that was completely ad-riddled, like GeoCities, then you needed to basically use a Yahoo group. And Fanfiction.net was fine, and a lot of people put their stuff there, but they had some massive amounts of downtime in the spring of 2001. And there were server issues and things like that, and people just couldn't upload their stories when they wanted to, or edit it when they wanted to, so like being on a Yahoo group, you had a little bit more control. But even a Yahoo group, because even of the limitation of the size- of the number of files and the size of the files, and the way it was moderated and things like that, nobody really felt like that was a permanent solution. So there was talk all through the spring about setting up a website that would host fanfiction. So we took control of our own place, and we started uploading stories all through the month of July, launched it with the novels-focus section, Schnoogle, almost exactly ten years ago this week. And about two or three weeks later, the other - once that had basically been tested and it was working, we set up another three sites to host - Riddikulus, for humorous fics, Astronomy Tower for anything that was romantic, because the trope at that point was that every character went up to the Astronomy Tower to snog somebody else.
Emma: [laughs] I remember that!
Heidi: And The Dark Arts for anything that was dramatic or angsty or mysterious - basically it was the catch-all category. And then we went live with FictionAlley Park, also in August of 2001, and it was getting a lot of traffic basically from the very start.
Emma: I love that we're talking so much about the history of fanfiction in this fandom as well as - we're working our way up to the movie premiere.
Heidi: Well, one of the unique things FictionAlley was doing was we would host fics no matter what the ship, or no matter who the character. All it had to do was take place in the Wizarding world, or in an AU of the Wizarding world. And that was something that no site other than fanfiction.net was doing
Emma: Oh, that's right, because the Sugar Quill was around at that time as well, wasn't it?
Heidi: Yeah, they had gone live February or March, maybe January, possibly earlier, and there were other sites. There was a girl named Eliza Dyonus Snape [?], and she would archive stories that were Snape-centric as long as they were het or gen and PG rated. And there were other people who would put together lists or even host stories on their own webspace, that were ship-specific or character-specific. But like I said, we didn't really have a fantastic Google search engine back then, I mean, Google existed, but it wasn't that great, so it was hard to find things unless everything was in the same place. And you know, that was also the early days of LiveJournal. That really wasn't thought of at that point as a place to archive your stories, although it was certainly a place to talk about them
Emma: Right, and I also remember the importance of it - I was in a different fandom at that time, but I remember the importance of archives then, and just being able to find things. And if you had something that you were looking for, that was even remotely, let's say, controversial, and if you were looking - the fandom I was in, chan was a big thing, um or RPF was just almost unallowed at the time, and so at the time there were mailing lists where people would say, you know, "you can't have this; you can't have that," and it's very different from the culture we have today, which I would say is mostly livejournal based, and really everything goes. And we've almost gone completely in the other direction, where before, you know, there were these archives and lists that were very specific about what was allowed and what was not, and now you're [not even really allowed to] criticize somebody else's ideas about what should be in fic. It's fascinating, what's happened in the last couple of years.
Heidi: It is, and if you go back through some of the posts on fictionalley from, um, I think 2004, we had a couple of the long time FictionAlley users who decided that we shouldn't be hosting any fics that contained bestiality, intergenerational ships, or underaged ships. Basically we got into a debate with some of the users who wanted us to bad all of these things because they felt it was unbecoming for their stories to be hosted on a site that hosted such illicit and atrocious topics. Obviously we took the American Library Association position that, as long as a story had an accurate summery, you know, the same way that books should have their content summarized on a flyleaf or on the back so that people know what a story is about in vague terms, that we weren't going to ban any topics or any discussions as concepts from FictionAlley, you know, we were going to continue our position of hosting everything, you know, as long as the grammar and spelling was reasonably okay. There's probably 250 posts on that thread, just it's a really interesting sort of slice of discussion within fandom circa that time. I mean, there are still some people who are anti-slash as a concept, but I think at this point, you'd be very very hard-pressed for somebody to say, and actually believe that, you know, there are no gay wizards. But in 2001 and 2002 and 2005, and pretty much until JK Rowling put it out there that Dumbledore had been in love with Grindelwald, there were people who still said that there were no gay wizards. It's very frustrating, obviously, to try and argue with people who believe that way, because they're obviously opposing their own personal beliefs on something. And when you've got, you know, wonderful quotes from JK Rowling extoling the virtues of Lolita, it's very very difficult to say, no she wouldn't approve of any of her characters engaged in any sort of sexual situations. Or at least, be okay with the fact that other people are writing about it. It's not like anyone is asking her to read it.
Emma: True. Nor do we want her to, necessarily. So we've talked a lot about your background in the Harry Potter fandom, and a lot about the history of the fandom as we've gone along, so I want to fast forward a little bit and talk about the premiere of the Deathly Hallows 2 move in London which you were at - were you representing FictionAlley or HPEF or were you just there? How did it happen?
Heidi: I've been to premieres before for harry potter both in New York for Prisoner of Azkaban and Half Blood Prince and the first Deathly Hallows, and in Los Angeles for Order of the Phoenix. But London was just an unbelievably different experience. Every time in the states, yes, there have been crowds on the streets, and the cast members have always gone over and chatted with people, and it's been an intense experience being among the other fansites and getting to interview the cast members and the script writers and the producers and the directors every time. But this was just a different, this was a festival, this was, you know, PotterFest, Potterbury - because people were comparing it to Glastonbury - in the middle of London on a day that started out with heavy miserable downpours, and ended up being the first Harry Potter premiere probably ever that was just complete sunshine, that was absolutely a gorgeous and glowing warm day.
Emma: So first of all, everybody who was following you on twitter that day was just insanely jealous of everyone who was there. But so you were really on the red carpet. Can you tell us a little bit about what kinds of experiences you had that day?
Heidi: Well, Warner Bros has been kind and generous enough to invite fansites to be part of the red carpet going all the way back to Prisoner of Azkaban at Radio City Music Hall in New York, although at that time, none of us had any idea what we were doing. We've gotten a lot more professional about it. Basically, the red carpet line is sort of a pen on one side of the carpet, and cast members and various other random celebrities come over and they talk to you. The cast members are usually brought by by a publicist, and some of the famous people just wander over on their own. Also see Darren Criss twice. Basically at London it was different, because the cast members were coming up from the stage that was in Trafalgar Square. That's the cast members and the producers and J. K. Rowling. So the got to come first past onto the stage, where they did a Q & A with some British journalist, the name of who is escaping me. And then they would walk down past the fans who were lining both sides of the red carpet. Some of them had amazing art. I mean, there were pictures of Dobby, there were thank-you notes to J. K. Rowling, there were people with Support Dumbledore rainbow flags, there were people with I've Always Believed in Snape banners, every fan trope that you could possibly expect, people had on signs or on t-shirts or on little posters that they were waving in the air. And getting to speak to some of the fans who had been camped out there for five, six, seven days was unbelievable. Their love of the books and their love of the movies and their love of the fandom was really what brought all those thousands of people there that day. That was fantastic and amazing. Then we were up in the press pens watching the fans on the other side and waiting for the various cast members to come by. And the first one who came by this time was Jason Issacs, who is the person that I have been waiting to talk to for years.
Emma: Oh my gosh
Heidi: Mostly because I absolutely love his perspective on Lucius Malfoy and the entire family. Some of the interviews he's done this year give you such insight as to why he played Lucius that way, and I think for a lot of people who came to fandom from the movies, or who read the books after seeing Chamber of Secrets, it's a very different perspective than people who had read the books before the movies were cast and before they started coming out. And I wanted to have a chance to ask him about that, and you know, he spoke just a little bit about how Lucius's story had not turned out the way that he had anticipated, that it was an absolutely fantastic twist that had Lucius doing time in prison and becoming an alcoholic and completely broken as a man and having to sort of put aside the dreams he had for his son to be this great shining light unto the Wizarding world because of Harry and because of Voldemort and of how his entire perspective of himself has to change. You know, he gave us probably four or five minutes of his time, which doesn't sound like a lot. But given that we were right next to Warner Bros and the BBC and other people who were also clamoring to talk to him, it was just a fantastic exchange and a fantastic interlude, and we were really grateful for it and he is so fantastic. And you know, also, Tom Felton is, always has been so forthcoming to fans and to fansites. I mean, he's one of the few cast members who's gone to DragonCon and come back, and he's coming back again this year
Emma: And gone again.
Heidi: And gone again, yeah. And he's just always a complete sweetheart. Then we got to talk with the directors and the producers, and you know, it's just fantastic to be able to spend time connecting with people. The unexpected part was that we had been given a list of cast members and other celebs who were going to be there, but then there were a lot of cast members who were not on the list, who didn't come down through the stage. And that includes the girl who plays Lavender, Devon Murray who plays Seamus, Alfie Enoch who plays Dean, and they came and chatted with us as well, and because they weren't on the list, nobody further down knew about them, they really didn't have as many demands on their time, so we got to spend a lot more time talking with them.
Emma: And then after that, you went on to Leaky Con, Right?
Heidi: Yes! Yes, I came home for almost a day and a half.
Emma: Were you just there as a fan, or were you working there as well?
Heidi: Well, I did a vid show, but no. Other than that, I was just enjoying myself, seeing friends, hanging out - I had a very mellow time.
Emma: And then after that, you went to ComiCon. So I mean, this went on and on and on.
Heidi: Yeah, it's been a crazy couple of weeks. I left LeakyCon on Sunday afternoon, and Wednesday morning, I flew off to ComiCon. We have our Harry Potter panel that we've been doing for the last four years. Originally, back in 208 and 2009, it was organized and moderated by a young man named Eric Bolling from San Diego, who unfortunately passed away the day after Christmas of 2009. We all still really miss him, because he is the reason why the Harry Potter panel is a part of ComiCon. And then last year, I organized it, but after Infinitus, I was sick and exhausted and I wasn't able to do the moderator duties. So Melissa and Ellie bravely stepped in for me at the last minute and did it. And then this year I did the organization and moderation of it, and I think we put together a pretty interesting panel. Every year we try to incorporate different elements of fandom. We wanted to have people from the news sites, from the fanfic side of things - that's me - we invited the International Quidditch Association this time, Andrew Slack from the HP Alliance who is now also branching off into a multifandom project called Imagine Better. Last year, we invited Darren Criss
Emma: And what an interesting year he's had.
Heidi: Gosh, what a year he's had! Last year, Darren and Melissa and initially me, until I knew I wasn't coming at all, were all kind of cranky because the Harry Potter panel was at the same time as the Glee panel.
Emma: [laughs]
Heidi: So they didn't get to go. But that's okay, because they're going this year.
Emma: Yeah.
Heidi: Yeah. So to, you know, sort of keep on with having someone from the, you know, the musical side of the fandom, this year, since obviously Darren wasn't available, we invited Joey Richter, who plays his best friend, Ron, and we got to talk a little about Starkid and some of the theatrical things that are going on in that realm of fandom. And I think that it was a good mix, because people that were attending the panel hadn't been exposed to, say, the International Quidditch Association, or weren't that familiar with fanfic on the page versus fan creativity in the fan film or fan musical genres. So I think that it was a good mix of discussion. We had plans for about an hour or so of discussion and Q&A from the audience and then about three weeks ago, I saw the first draft of the Thursday schedule of ComiCon when it got posted onto one of the websites, and I noticed that there was a little show that was going to be having its ComiCon debut the same day as our panel. The show is called Awake, and it stars a gentleman named Jason Isaacs. So I sent an email over to Melissa immediately and I was like, "What can we do about this? Is there anything we can do about this?" And she was then speaking with Evanna Lynch about LeakyCon-related things, and mentioned this the day before, or two days before Evanna was going to be going to the continent with Jason to debut Deathly Hallows PR. So. I talked to Melissa, who talked to Evanna, who talked to Jason, who said he wanted to do it, who told Evanna who told Melissa to tell me it might happen. And he was going to see if we could work out the schedule. And then at the premiere - I'd been keeping this a secret for about two weeks - basically when he was leaving the fansite area, I said, "and we'll hope to see you at ComiCon." And he said, "Oh, you're the one who's working on it." And I said, "yes, and if there's anything that you can do with your schedule, we would really appreciate it. And then I show up at ComiCon, and they have his signing for Awake scheduled at the exact same time as our panel. So I [pained?] Melissa, we wibbled a little bit, she says she'll contact him and see what we can do. And he changed his schedule. He told Fox to change the time of the signing so that he could come to our panel for fifteen minutes.
Emma: Oh my gosh. He is so awesome.
Heidi: and to be in that room knowing that he is about to walk in, and hearing people in the audience muttering, "Where's Melissa? Is she still coming?" And to see her walk into the room - and I'm watching the audience - to see her walk into the room and say, "Oh I found a diehard Harry Potter fan wandering the halls, he wanted to come in and say hi," and just the woosh from the crowd when he came in, was just -oh. And he did a great Q&A, he spent about fifteen minutes talking to everybody, and for someone to spend fifteen minutes on anything at ComiCon, especially for someone who's, you know, the lead in a tv show to spend fifteen minutes in a 350 person room - I would say it's unheard of, but it happened earlier that day when some Lost creator showed up at a Lost fan's panel.
Emma: I can only imagine what it would be like to be sitting there and just knowing what's going to be coming, and watching him walk in. That is fantastic. So we all know you have this great love for Harry Potter, but are there other fandoms or other things that you're involved in online besides this stuff that keeps you super busy?
Heidi: You know, the Harry Potter stuff does keep me so busy, I mean, in Supernatural, I've helped moderate on SPN SummerGen, I've been one of the reccers on Crack Impala, and I've been vaguely participatory in other things, you know, there've been a couple, oh god, back in the day of Heroes and things like that. But I think I've just been so busy and so caught up in Harry Potter the last two years that what I really do in other fandoms is vid and read. And those are the two things that I really enjoy doing.
Emma: We're going to wrap this up with some final questions that I ask everybody that I interview. So, what is your favorite fic of all time?
Heidi: I think that my perpetual comfort fic - the one that I go back to if I have a two-hour stretch on an airplane and absolutely nothing is catching my eye - is astolot's Old Country, which is a Supernatural/Harry Potter crossover, and it's just brilliant, the way that, because of course she wrote Harry Potter fanfic back in 2000, maybe even earlier than that, and her take on Harry and Draco is probably one of the first that I read that probably got me to understand how the two of them interplay with each other on so many levels. So to see her writing a story where the Supernatural characters are put into the Harry Potter world right after Deathly Hallows, just, is fantastic and will always be one of my go-to, I will always love these stories.
Emma: What's your favorite piece of fanart?
Heidi: I'm going to have to be really old-school in this, because nothing will ever touch me the way that seeing the first FictionAlley cover, back in early July of 2001, seeing Starling and Pricilla - the stuff that she was doing with Starling back in 2000 is really how I see the characters in my mind when I’m not occasionally thinking of the way that they look in the films.
Emma: What's your OTP? It doesn't have to be Harry Potter, it can be anything.
Heidi: I don't have one OTP. I have, you know, I think I've tried, but there's no way that I can stick to just one. I love Harry/Draco and I always will, and I love Remus and Sirius and I always will. I love Draco and Hermione and I always will. But, you know, when people ask me who my OTP is, I will go sometimes on a very very long discourse as to why Regulus Black and Barty Crouch, Jr are just the perfect pairing to think about and talk about, and everybody agrees that it makes perfect logical sense both within canon and within fandom. So, them, my boys.
Emma: What's the most interesting feedback you've ever gotten for something you've done in fandom?
Heidi: I did a sort of Dr Who/David Tennant wrap-up fanvid in the very very beginning of 2010, set to DJ Earworm's 2009 mashup of the top 25 songs of the year. And I think that that's my fanvid that's gotten the second most number of comments - the first one is Dean Winchester being angsty, which is just a perpetual trope. But it made a lot of people cry, and it made me cry. And going back and watching this video I made eighteen months later still makes me weepy, just because of all the emotions of Tennant leaving, and nobody knew what to expect coming next, and you know, looking back at all his seasons all together, and there's something very very rewarding about hearing that you've touched somebody's emotions and I think that that's probably it.
Emma: Awww. What fic trope is something you almost never get tired of? No matter how horribly clichéd it becomes.
Heidi: I will always have a soft spot for enemies getting closer - enemies becoming friends, or enemies becoming lovers, depending on context. And I think that that's probably one of the reasons why I enjoy Harry and Draco, and why I enjoy Draco and Hermione, because it's just got so much of that going on in there.
Emma: So what pairing have you never written that you've always wanted to try?
Heidi: Uh, either 2002 or 2003, we did a challenge on FictionAlley that was basically write what you'll never write kind of thing? And me and a friend of mine wrote Harry inherits a unicorn farm when Sirius - from his parents that Sirius had been keeping custody of. And Ginny is working there, and it was this extremely - it wasn't [?], it was just this amusing Harry and Ginny story, and I never had thought that I'd be able to write that and, you know, do it credit. Other than that, I think that I've pretty much read at least a paragraph of every pairing that you can come up with, because for a long time, I was coding fics for FictionAlley. And you know, I avoid Hagrid ships as much as possible, because Hagrid in sexual situations with human beings generally squicks me. But there's nothing that I wouldn’t read if it was written creatively and written well.
Emma: And what question do people never ask you that you wish they would?
Heidi: I think that, in terms of questions that I've always wanted to answer, you've really asked a lot of them today. Because there is the people who were in the Harry Potter fandom back in 1999/2000/2001 when things were really just getting started - they all have their own stories to tell about participating and watching how things sort of grew and developed, and it's weird trying to explain to people now, when people are like, well why didn't you put clips from Nimbus up on YouTube? Why didn't you livestream from Lumos? I'm like, we didn't have that kind of thing back then!
Emma: It's like, really, it was usenet. That was what we had. Yeah.
Heidi: Exactly
Emma: That explains…
Heidi: [uphold?] both ways, and we liked it, and so did a showrunner for Dr Who. Who was on usenet back in the 90s, and like, hypothesizing about whether the Doctor was truly married to the TARDIS and what her name would be. And then of course, you know, he has Neil Gaiman write it, and he films it, and it becomes canon! So yes, the days of Usenet, and the days of egroups and yahoo clubs and things like that, are just bizzare to go back and try to explain to people who think that Google has always existed.
Emma: Right, and then you can go back even further to the 'zine days, when people had to like, wait - you had to know somebody that knew somebody who would send you a zine wrapped in brown paper. Oh my gosh - that's something I can't even fathom.
Heidi: I never would have found it back then, because I would have been too shy to ask anyone who possibly could have given me any information about it. I mean, one of the very first things I did when I was using links to browse the world wide web, and use goferspace circa 1993 and 1994, was - I was looking at lists of quotes and theories about Twin Peakes
Emma: Oh, yeah
Heidi: And had there been internet in 1990 and 1991, my God, I would have been all over that. And now you can't stumble over an issue of Entertainment Weekly without reading fandom-generated analysis and bullseyes and comments and things like the International Quidditch Association showing up on the Daily Show. Can you imagine, ten years ago, that could have never happened. Back in 2002, people were absolutely terrified that FictionAlley being mentioned on the front page of the New York Times would spell the end of fandom because the Powers that Be would now know about us and come and smack us down. Well, it's been nine years and that hasn't happened yet, and obviously, given the way things are going, it's never going to. That's a question that people never ask me anymore: do you think the Powers That Be are going to come and shut down all of fandom forever and ever? No. They're not. They like us. Most of the time.
Emma: That's a great point. That's also a really great place to leave it. Thank you so much for taking time out of your super-busy schedule - I think you were home for just a couple of days before you're dashing off on yet another trip.
Heidi: Thank you, Emma.
Emma: And that wraps us up for the Insider Interview for Episode 22. Thanks to Heidi for joining us, and we'll see you next time.
Transcribed by el_em_en_oh_pee