Quote:
Originally Posted by DNSB
An interesting claim. Do you have any evidence to back it up? I remember my children reading the books along with a good chunk of their friends and none of them read any Harry Potter fanfic. I do have memories of shepherding groups of them to the first 3 Harry Potter films
Hmm... just bounced a query off my daughter. 22 years after reading Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, she hadn't read any fanfic and was only vaguely aware that Harry Potter fanfic existed. I suggested My Immortal as a starting point to ensure she never reads any more.  |
I wasn't really trying to make that sort of claim, since it's basically impossible to make it with any degree of certainty (note the word
might). The beginnings of fan fiction are mired in early internet culture, and as of yet we have no reliable and exhaustive research in the development during those early days.
Harry Potter fan fiction outnumbers any other by several orders of magnitude, to the tune of hundreds of thousands of stories and different false-flag fan edits passing off as original books. (The analysis cited in one of the preceding posts focuses on a small sample (less than 10% of the total number of stories), from 2003 onwards, and I'm not certain how that fact might affect the findings.) I had intended it to remain in the realm of potentiality, and not as any
coup de grace argument for any prevailing thesis, I regret if that is the way it came off. I was trying to illustrate a point that I believe can be made today more vigorously than in the past, by giving a reasonably conjectural example of one of the most vibrant fan fiction communities as a potential "early-bird" example.
What we can claim to some degree of certainty is that in those early days
Harry Potter fan fiction helped shape and popularise the creative community, especially since at one point Rowling did give her blessing, which few authors at the time had done. HP fan fiction was a notable participant that helped define the relationships and boundaries of an ill-defined new creative space. However, the crux of my point is really much larger than
Harry Potter, and has to do with the fact that that point represents one of the defining moments in what will ultimately become our new media reality. That is a claim that is not thought about enough, but I think is evident today - communities of interest are key factors that impact what will be made or published. Hence all the rehashes on our media horizon, with ready-made dedicated communities and a potential to draw in fresh audiences with basic variations (often average by fanfic standards) on canonical material. Franchises today are being engineered through transmedial projects in order to grab as much attention of nativists in media forms as possible. That's why I find Harry Potter an interesting case study, because many of these elements exist in the franchise in ways that differ from
Star Trek or earlier examples, that seem to point towards our present dilemma.
Oh, we shan't sully the fine footprint of this forum by discussing
My Immortal? Talk about He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named...