December Daily: Looking back on Harry Potter

[resonant]

cesperanza, "I'll ask an HP question, actually, because I wasn't really ever in it and I'm interested in the reactions of people who were. It seems to me from the outside so spectacularly meh now; like, it was the fictional equiv of Lost (which I also didn't watch) where it was fascinating as a piece of serialized fiction but where the execution simply couldn't live up to the collective imagination. Am I wrong?"

Well, you're not wrong ... but "fascinating as a piece of serialized fiction but where the execution simply couldn't live up to the collective imagination" is just another way of saying "Fanbait."

I mean, Shatner-era Star Trek -- the classic fandom inspiration -- would you say it could live up to the collective imagination? Would you be eager to watch it today if the Trek universe in your mind didn't include the fanworks as well as the canon?

Maybe you'd have a lot of writers and directors saying, "I remembered it fondly from childhood, and then I went back and watched it again ... and it inspired me to create things that were actually as good as what I remembered."

So. Harry Potter. If I re-read Philosopher's Stone, Chamber of Secrets, and Prisoner of Azkaban, I expect that it would be a genuine pleasure. Goblet of Fire and Order of the Phoenix would be a mixed pleasure. I barely got through Half-Blood Prince and Deathly Hallows the first time.

On the other hand, the universe shows some cracks where the ethics weren't fully thought through, but every page is jam-packed with invention. The characters were sometimes shoehorned into going ways that they didn't want to go, but there are so many of them, and they're still alive.

I could open any book to a random page and start reading, and I'll bet I'd have a story idea within three pages. I might describe it as "here's something else JKR screwed up," but it would be a story idea!


schneefink, I moved your question earlier to make room for ride_4ever's birthday.



1 -- goss, "VENOM! Why do you think it's been such an instant hit with Fandom, and what are some of your favourite fanworks so far?" and nestra, "Any Venom recs?"
2 -- anitac588, "How do you relate to different fandoms? Do you revisit them? Sometimes I find it difficult to go back to reading stories in 'old' fandoms after discovering new OTP."
3 -- marginaliana, "what is your favorite physical non-living thing? Not a person or a pet, but it could be something you own or a piece of art, etc."
4 -- cesperanza, "I'll ask an HP question, actually, because I wasn't really ever in it and I'm interested in the reactions of people who were. It seems to me from the outside so spectacularly meh now; like, it was the fictional equiv of Lost (which I also didn't watch) where it was fascinating as a piece of serialized fiction but where the execution simply couldn't live up to the collective imagination. Am I wrong?"
5 -- teigh_corvus, "Your thoughts on James Joyce and Ulysses."
6 -- kass, "If the you of 10 years ago could see you now, what would surprise her most?"
7 -- jjhunter, "What do you carry with you?"
8 -- mific, "Sounds like you commute to and fro still. How do you pass the time traveling? Music? Audiobooks? Something else? Any reccs? :)"
9 -- torch, "favorite advent songs!"
10 -- princessofgeeks, "How did you go about changing fandoms? Was it, historically, something you did or something that just happened? Did friends lure you? Did you find new shows to watch?"
11 -- reginagiraffe, "(It's MrGiraffe's birthday so...) Have you ever written a birthday themed story? If not, what couple would have the best/funnest/easiest birthday story to write and why?"
12 -- laurenthemself, "What are your thoughts on Thor: Ragnarok? I know ya boy Steve wasn't in it but did you have any shippy feelings?"
13 -- allheadybooks, "13. What's your least favorite thing about splitting your time between two houses? (My wife and I are also in a commuter marriage at the moment, and I get so frustrated every weekend when I have to go grocery shopping AGAIN because I thought I had eggs but that was at the other apartment!"
14 -- schneefink, "how about your field of study/work/specialization/hobby and how a book/movie/series/canon got it terribly/hilariously wrong?"
15 -- china_shop, "What hooks you into a fanfic? Is it banter, characterisation, tropes, or...? Is it different from what hooks you into original fic?"
16 -- muccamukk, "Describe a long fic you always wanted to write, but never have and likely never will."
17 -- ride_4ever, "rec two due South fanworks: a favorite that you created and a favorite that someone else created. (Anything! Triggers and squicks not a concern for me.)"
18 -- kass, "What have you read recently that you've enjoyed?
19 -- jjhunter, "What are five words you like or find especially meaningful + 1 word you despise? Why?"
20 --
21 --
22 -- mekare, What would Ben Fraser do in 2018?
23 -- marina, "What was the last book you read that wasn't fanfic and that you intensely loved, and why."
24 -- wychwood, "Something about SGA! What's the one fic you're sorry you never wrote? What was your favourite episode? Do you still love John/Rodney? How gay WAS John Sheppard? Where in Atlantis would you live if you could pick any room you liked? Pick one or a topic of your choice."
25 --
26 --
27 --destina, "how has your relationship to fandom changed over the years? By which I mean not just participation in it, but your level of tolerance/interest for the cyclical things about it, the way old arguments never really stop or die, etc, but also the ways fandom changes and new ways of doing fandom evolve. (And old ways evolve out, and terms evolve, etc.)"
28 -- kass, "What do you like best about where you live?"
29 --
30 -- china_shop, "Your favourite book you read this year."
31 -- wolfshark, "what is your favorite story to reread of your own stuff? what was your favorite story to write?"

Comments

[runpunkrun]

I could open any book to a random page and start reading, and I'll bet I'd have a story idea within three pages. I might describe it as "here's something else JKR screwed up," but it would be a story idea!

:D

[mekare]

OMG that icon! I remember laughing so hard when I saw that episode for the first time last year.

[runpunkrun]

It was an amazing moment in human history.

[jamethiel]

Absolutely! I'm in Harry Potter (again. After a long fandom hiatus) and it's really interesting to see what tropes have been uncritically accepted (not throwing shade! I love me some tropes) and what authors clearly THINK about the inconsistencies or went "... you know what, that was never explored/explained."

At the moment, I'm writing again. Nominally it's Harry/Hermione but actually it's sort of an exploration of grief and loss and PTSD set in a mystery. How did Ginny react to essentially living in an occupied town for the last year and running/participating in a resistance? How do humans react to immense grief and loss on a society-wide scale? How do you stop, when all you've known in your life is A Mission.

I mean, I know JKR didn't put it in because kids books and limited to Harry's POV and stuff, but wow, there's so much there.

[resonant]

The books also swing back and forth between a fairy-tale approach to emotion and a more realistic approach, in a way that's not always successful. I remember being in a chatroom one time when someone said, "The book I want to read now is Harry Potter and His Well-Heeled Therapist."

[jamethiel]

Right? It completely blows off Harry's abusive childhood (some authors play it up too much but... oh my god! That was a "get the authorities involved" moment) and yet wants us to grieve over the death of Sirius Black.

So I'm always here for more thoughtful, grown up interpretations of the canon. You know: "what if."

[jjhunter]

For your remaining December daily blanks - your choice of two prompts (or both!):
7. What do you carry with you?
19. What are five words you like or find especially meaningful + 1 word you despise? Why?

[kass]

I'm re-experiencing HP now because my kidlet, who is nine, is reading the books. (Tonight I read him a chapter of Deathly Hallows; he can read to himself now, so it's kind of a treat when he asks me to read to him.) And yeah -- it's kind of entertaining the extent to which the books themselves are not as good as what fandom made out of them. Then again, given that I came into fandom via Sentinel, this should NOT SURPRISE ME.

<3

[resonant]

I didn't read them aloud to the kidlet, but I did get to watch the wonder of a person who was reading them at the recommended age. I think to this day the kidlet has a lot more respect for them than I do.

[mekare]

given that I came into fandom via Sentinel, this should NOT SURPRISE ME.

Oh man. I feel that. I actually watched the Sentinel after having read some Sentinel AUs, then some ship manifestos and fandom primers of the actual show, some fanfic of the show and yes. It was exactly that.

[cesperanza]

Hee, yes, I absolutely believe this--I mean, my god, I was in SGA, I get fanbait! Fanbait are imperfect works to be sure: the better I think a thing is, the less interested I am in doing fanwork for it! But I thought that HP fans thought that HP was "better" than fanbait, and there's kind of an outside view that the HP books are "good" in a way that I think they aren't; I'd go with you to the first trilogy I think, before it went full SGA. The first three are books you could reread as books, I think--but I didn't know if I was biased!

[resonant]

A lot of fans are convinced that the books are All That, but mostly I think those are people who either are too young to have read very much or are just the kind of people who don't read very much. And, in fairness, I was in my thirties when the books came out -- if I'd been twelve, I might be viewing them as completely magic to this day.

(When I was actually twelve, I read Longfellow's Song of Hiawatha over and over and over and over. I haven't dared to look at it as an adult, but it's fair to assume that it's not the world of beauty and wonder that I thought it was when I was a kid.)

[cesperanza]

I get the genius of the worldbuilding - but that was SGA too, a magical sentient city that the writer had NO IDEA what to do with. The world of HP is amazing, the execution is--IDK, wildly sloppy but I'm someone who wants every gun fired and every t crossed!

[resonant]

But imagine if you were contractually obligated to take the very first fiction you ever wrote and make a seven-book series out of it!

A co-worker of mine recently shared some of her fanfiction with me. It's het, SGA crossed over with a series I've never watched, very much Not My Kind Of Thing, but the thing that really struck me was that her fantasy John Sheppard is a very confident dommy straight guy, while the fantasy Sheppard in my neck of fandom was the Tragedy Of The Closet.

[delphi]

I could open any book to a random page and start reading, and I'll bet I'd have a story idea within three pages. I might describe it as "here's something else JKR screwed up," but it would be a story idea!

Ha! Also: same. I started the series when just the first three books were out, and I picked them up entirely because they seemed to have fannish potential. The online fandom was still small enough to qualify for rare fandom/ship mailing lists, and the appeal for me was a charming, inventive world aimed at kids but with a large number of interesting older characters and lots of kid-lit gaps to fill in as a fanfic writer. I was disappointed by many aspects of the later books from a storytelling perspective, but one of the things that jostled me out of the fandom a little as it became such a huge phenomenon was the contingent who felt that HP fandom should only be for people who thought the books were some of the best they'd ever read. As you say, the characters went in some directions I don't think were well thought out or earned, but here I am still thinking about them and wanting to play with them all these years later.

[resonant]

Yeah, I enjoyed the first three books a lot, but at the same time, I thought of them as 'fantasy for people who haven't read literally any other fantasy.'

[pauraque]

I mean, Shatner-era Star Trek -- the classic fandom inspiration -- would you say it could live up to the collective imagination? Would you be eager to watch it today if the Trek universe in your mind didn't include the fanworks as well as the canon?

This is a very apt comparison. I can't imagine watching TOS without the context of fandom. (I mean, I did when I watched it the first time, but I was a little kid and wasn't yet able to analyze media beyond "I like this".) I can remember reading the first few HP books as books, but by the time it got to OotP, I was so invested in the fandom that there was no way to separate the two. I was reacting to everything that happened as "fandom will love this" or "fandom will hate this" or "there's going to be so much fic about this". I have absolutely no idea what I would have thought of the last few books if I'd read them outside of that context.

[resonant]

Yep! And that's true of most of the contemporary media I watch, too. (In fact, often the only thing that makes it bearable to stick my head into the soup of rape culture and consumerism and unexplored disturbing assumptions that is entertainment is being able to imagine what fandom's going to do with it afterwards.)

[schneefink]

I could open any book to a random page and start reading, and I'll bet I'd have a story idea within three pages. I might describe it as "here's something else JKR screwed up," but it would be a story idea!

That is a rare and great thing in any canon :) I might have to try it...

[resonant]

I didn't like Book 7 at all, but there's this one moment when the Trio are hiding in teh Department of Mysteries and they overhear some employees talking about "the thing with the carnivorous ducks." I mean! Someone in fandom should totally write a story about what happened with the carnivorous ducks.