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A little essay I wrote for ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
fandom_history, which is dedicated to the concept of preserving the history of Harry Potter fandom and encourages members to tell their stories.
Wow. This concept takes me back. Let's see here . . .
. . . because I can't remember anything ever. The best I can give you for when I first tried a look is "sometime in the second half on 1999."
My sister was reading the first book for school. We were at our dad's and I was insanely bored. I'd heard of these Harry Potter books and that they were supposed to be good, so I picked it up.
When I was little, I used to start reading the second I was awake, before I was even fully conscious. My parents had a rule that I could read in the morning until it was time to get ready for school, and they quickly had to tack on an addendum that I could not get up before seven. But then I hit puberty and I stopped doing that. I hadn't done it for years.
I did it with Philospher's Stone. (Okay, okay, Sorcerer's Stone, I'm in the States, but I just hate that so much.)
Sadly I had to give the book back to my sister because she needed it for school. She never did finish it. *grumble* And you know what's funny? I don't remember finishing it myself. Nor do I remember when I learned it was a series. I do remember buying books two and three with my Christmas Borders certificates and slamming through both of them in a few hours while I was at my friend's house, though. I remember waiting frantically for my seventeenth birthday (another month, so that's not as bad as it sounds) and then using another certificate to buy the first book.
And I remember swearing to myself that I would not, that is WOULD NOT, slash Harry Potter. In spite of having been a die-hard slasher for about a year and a half by then, and not ever having considered anything to be off-limits (I wrote Inspector Gadget movieslash at the tender age of sixteen, for heaven's sake), I would leave HP alone. I vowed that it would remain pure. And if you are at all familiar with the phrase "dramatic irony," you know where this is going.
And, oh, the waiting. The waaaaaaiting for book four. The agonizing staring at the calender and waiting for her to decide on a damn title already. The reserving my copy at Borders months ahead of time. The deciding that three months in advance was fine for starting to cross days off my calendar.
And when the precious date of July 8, 2000 comes, what does my mother do? SHE MAKES ME GO PICK STRAWBERRIES. I mean, yes, she took me to Borders to get my book after, but dude. She made me go pick strawberries first. Even though I HAD TO WORK that day and would therefore NOT HAVE TIME to read as much of my book as I could have if she hadn't made me GO PICK STRAWBERRIES.
I am twenty years old and still bitter about this. What a sad little figure I am.
And Draco Malfoy didn't help any with my goal of actually getting some reading done. He started whispering this and wouldn't shut up until, thirty pages in, I gave up, put down the book, and picked up a pen. Then I was horrified to realize that I had broken my sacred vow. But then there was no dwelling, because I had to go to work. When I got home, I read until something like one in the morning, when I forced myself to go to bed.
From there, I figured that since I'd broken the sacred vow and all, I may as well go pulverize it. I can't remember how I found the hpslash list, but I do remember discovering after I'd joined that it was run by none other than a good friend of mine from Buffy fandom, Michelle (or, as we often called her, Chelle). I posted my fic and got a good response, so it became a trilogy. (By the way, I'm pretty damn sure that this last fic was the first to offer up the idea that Snape suffered unrequited love for James. Not that I pretend for a second that that's due to anything other than good timing on my part. In fact, a couple years later I received a review on it accusing me of being unoriginal! How entertaining.)
And so it is that I became an HP slasher and a Harry/Malfoy shipper in one fell swoop. That's right - I've been around so long that I remember when the majority of people called him Malfoy instead of Draco. In fact, I've been around for so long that I have old AIM conversations saved in which I am bemoaning the LACK of HP slash. Now you can't turn around online without tripping over it.
Also, that August I visited a friend in Canada, and spent a hundred bucks (Canadian) to buy all the UK books in hardcover. Some of the best money I've ever spent, as I firmly believe in the original being the best and resented the way they Americanized the versions released here. (Hence my loathing of saying Sorcerer's rather than Philosopher's.)
I wrote a few more fics - a couple of freaky disturbing slash pieces (in one of which I also pioneered the concept of Lucius lusting for his son; I remember a friend of mine being in absolute awe over the idea. She is now a serious Lucius/Draco shipper) and some actual genfic. I don't do genfic. It was fun, though. One of those pieces is the result of my answering a challenge which ended badly for me - basically, I busted my ass getting it finished on time, as I discovered the challenge six days before the due date, and then I didn't even show up with the webowner posted the results. Apparently the e-mail had been lost; even after acknowledging this, the webowner wouldn't even link my fic. Also, I wasn't the only one that got screwed in that particular contest. I'm not going into details because I spotted said webowner's name in the members list here (if you figure out who it is, please don't say, I'm trying really hard to avoid identifying the person with so much as a gender-specific pronoun), but suffice it to say that I was months getting over being furious about that and felt I and the other author had been badly treated. I wasn't the only one who thought so, either.
But that was pretty much the only really ugly incident I was actually involved in; there were a couple of unpleasantnesses on hpslash, but I was peripheral to them at best.
Meanwhile, nmws of the movie was coming out; I was highly doubtful of the idea, but surrendered when the casting of Alan Rickman was confirmed. I love Alan Rickman, and the idea of him playing Snape was too much for me to resist. So I decided to see the film, but only for Rickman. I was in no hurry and waited for a month after it came out so I could see it with my mom. Aside from Rickman, I was none too impressed, then I went through a period where I thought I liked it. The day it came out on DVD, my manager, a fellow fan, actually let me leave work to run across the street to where I'd reserved my copy of the DVD. And I've watched it maybe once since. It's just . . . not a very good movie. Actually, I think it's kind of boring. I think the best thing about it was that it converted my best friend, Amanda. She adored the movie and promptly set out to read the books, and now I suspect she's a bigger fan than I am.
I lost touch with the fandom, not out of lack of interest, but simply because I found new obsessions that took up my time. I remember when Chelle left the list in Little Alex's hands, which was cool with me because Alex is a good friend of mine. In fact, when she gave up running it, she offered it to me! I believe my reaction ran somewhere along the lines of "oh god no," but more polite. When I returned to the list eventually, I had to send an e-mail confirming my age (finally legal) to a total stranger, and that was just weird.
So I was late catching up with news of the next movie. This is silly, because my favourite character for years has been Gilderoy Lockhart and I was very worried about how the movie would treat him. The casting of Kenneth Branagh did not allay my fears (probably because I didn't hear the Hugh Grant rumours until after the fact; I woudl have felt much better about Branagh if I'd known that). After all, in my ignorant Americanhood, I only knew Branagh from our required-by-law viewing of his Hamlet in sophomore year. So my view was this: "Wait, the Hamlet guy? The Hamlet is playing Gilderoy? WHY?!" I decided there should be a rule: Hamlet cannot play Gilderoy Lockhart. All the while, mind you, I was praying that I would be wrong and that Branagh would make me eat my words.
Like a dutiful little fan, I bought my tickets a week in advance and dragged a friend along on opening day, arriving at least two or three hours early. The first viewing was EXTREMELY interesting, as I had made the fatal mistake of going out to see The Ring the night before, and as a result I was very jumpy and running on two hours' sleep. And caffeine. A lot of caffeine.
I was colossally relieved to see that Gilderoy had indeed been treated fairly by all involved (except for the smack on the head with the rock, like, what the hell was that?) and the Hamlet guy was indeed up to the task. Whew. I was so pleased with him for not sucking that I sought out more of his work and . . . well, I'll let the eight Kenneth Branagh movies I now own speak for themselves.
I saw CoS six times in the theatre, which was at least once too many, because I got so sick of it that I still haven't bought it. I am still not ready to sit through the year-long spider scene and the century-long basilisk scene, to say nothing of the exposition, yet again.
Which I believe brings me up to the announcement of OotP's release date. I saved that clipping.
I wasn't as hysterically excited as I was for the fourth book; actually, I was kind of in shock. I'd started half-believing that there would never be another book, and after three years of waiting that semi-belief took a while to shift. I reserved my copy, of course, and finally the day came. June twenty-first. As I still live with my mom and don't have my license (I'm working on it, I swear), she was my ride, and she was kind enough to agree to get up at a ridiculous hour so that we could take the hour-long ride to the mall and get my book just as it opened for business. This makes up for that strawberry thing a million times over. My sister - who, by the way, finally got into the books a couple of months ago and has breezed through them at an amazing rate for nonreader like herself (somehow, she even got to the end of PoA without getting spoiled about Sirius being a good guy; I was so happy) - came with us because she wanted to go clothes shopping. Clothes shopping for her is quite an endeavour, so I got to spend three happy hours in the Borders café blissfully reading away.
Read the entire book that day, in about eleven hours, barely stopping for food and only reluctantly stopping for bathroom visits. I was overwhelmed when I got to the bit with Gilderoy. You see, I had long since resigned myself to the fact that he was a bit character at best and, now that he had been properly disposed of, we would never see him again and probably never hear much about him either. I was willing to settle for even a tiny throwaway sentence about his current status, but doubted I'd get even that much. And then a whole scene! I had to put down the book for a minute to gather myself, and I would have cried for joy except that my sister (reading CoS nearby) was already looking at me as if I had three heads. So the entire actual point of the scene was totally lost on me - Neville who? Longbottom what? - and now I have hope, dammit. Hope that he might show up again. Hope is a treacherous beast.
And by the time I got to the end, my brain was so tired that I simply didn't cry. And I haven't really cried since. I was stunned for about a week and kept almost crying whenever the realization renewed itself, but no tears. And I'd like to state for the record that I want Sirius to stay dead. I'm sick of character death and there's the grief and then, oh, he's not dead after all! I really hate that. It's cheap and stupid.
So I was back in HP fandom for a while, and then one day I went to see Pirates of the Caribbean and, well, my focus has shifted slightly. I'm kind of fickle. I'll go back, though; I always do.
I wonder how long we'll wait for the next book?
I can't believe it took me an hour and a half to write that. The heck with proofreading for typos.
fandom_history, which is dedicated to the concept of preserving the history of Harry Potter fandom and encourages members to tell their stories.Wow. This concept takes me back. Let's see here . . .
. . . because I can't remember anything ever. The best I can give you for when I first tried a look is "sometime in the second half on 1999."
My sister was reading the first book for school. We were at our dad's and I was insanely bored. I'd heard of these Harry Potter books and that they were supposed to be good, so I picked it up.
When I was little, I used to start reading the second I was awake, before I was even fully conscious. My parents had a rule that I could read in the morning until it was time to get ready for school, and they quickly had to tack on an addendum that I could not get up before seven. But then I hit puberty and I stopped doing that. I hadn't done it for years.
I did it with Philospher's Stone. (Okay, okay, Sorcerer's Stone, I'm in the States, but I just hate that so much.)
Sadly I had to give the book back to my sister because she needed it for school. She never did finish it. *grumble* And you know what's funny? I don't remember finishing it myself. Nor do I remember when I learned it was a series. I do remember buying books two and three with my Christmas Borders certificates and slamming through both of them in a few hours while I was at my friend's house, though. I remember waiting frantically for my seventeenth birthday (another month, so that's not as bad as it sounds) and then using another certificate to buy the first book.
And I remember swearing to myself that I would not, that is WOULD NOT, slash Harry Potter. In spite of having been a die-hard slasher for about a year and a half by then, and not ever having considered anything to be off-limits (I wrote Inspector Gadget movieslash at the tender age of sixteen, for heaven's sake), I would leave HP alone. I vowed that it would remain pure. And if you are at all familiar with the phrase "dramatic irony," you know where this is going.
And, oh, the waiting. The waaaaaaiting for book four. The agonizing staring at the calender and waiting for her to decide on a damn title already. The reserving my copy at Borders months ahead of time. The deciding that three months in advance was fine for starting to cross days off my calendar.
And when the precious date of July 8, 2000 comes, what does my mother do? SHE MAKES ME GO PICK STRAWBERRIES. I mean, yes, she took me to Borders to get my book after, but dude. She made me go pick strawberries first. Even though I HAD TO WORK that day and would therefore NOT HAVE TIME to read as much of my book as I could have if she hadn't made me GO PICK STRAWBERRIES.
I am twenty years old and still bitter about this. What a sad little figure I am.
And Draco Malfoy didn't help any with my goal of actually getting some reading done. He started whispering this and wouldn't shut up until, thirty pages in, I gave up, put down the book, and picked up a pen. Then I was horrified to realize that I had broken my sacred vow. But then there was no dwelling, because I had to go to work. When I got home, I read until something like one in the morning, when I forced myself to go to bed.
From there, I figured that since I'd broken the sacred vow and all, I may as well go pulverize it. I can't remember how I found the hpslash list, but I do remember discovering after I'd joined that it was run by none other than a good friend of mine from Buffy fandom, Michelle (or, as we often called her, Chelle). I posted my fic and got a good response, so it became a trilogy. (By the way, I'm pretty damn sure that this last fic was the first to offer up the idea that Snape suffered unrequited love for James. Not that I pretend for a second that that's due to anything other than good timing on my part. In fact, a couple years later I received a review on it accusing me of being unoriginal! How entertaining.)
And so it is that I became an HP slasher and a Harry/Malfoy shipper in one fell swoop. That's right - I've been around so long that I remember when the majority of people called him Malfoy instead of Draco. In fact, I've been around for so long that I have old AIM conversations saved in which I am bemoaning the LACK of HP slash. Now you can't turn around online without tripping over it.
Also, that August I visited a friend in Canada, and spent a hundred bucks (Canadian) to buy all the UK books in hardcover. Some of the best money I've ever spent, as I firmly believe in the original being the best and resented the way they Americanized the versions released here. (Hence my loathing of saying Sorcerer's rather than Philosopher's.)
I wrote a few more fics - a couple of freaky disturbing slash pieces (in one of which I also pioneered the concept of Lucius lusting for his son; I remember a friend of mine being in absolute awe over the idea. She is now a serious Lucius/Draco shipper) and some actual genfic. I don't do genfic. It was fun, though. One of those pieces is the result of my answering a challenge which ended badly for me - basically, I busted my ass getting it finished on time, as I discovered the challenge six days before the due date, and then I didn't even show up with the webowner posted the results. Apparently the e-mail had been lost; even after acknowledging this, the webowner wouldn't even link my fic. Also, I wasn't the only one that got screwed in that particular contest. I'm not going into details because I spotted said webowner's name in the members list here (if you figure out who it is, please don't say, I'm trying really hard to avoid identifying the person with so much as a gender-specific pronoun), but suffice it to say that I was months getting over being furious about that and felt I and the other author had been badly treated. I wasn't the only one who thought so, either.
But that was pretty much the only really ugly incident I was actually involved in; there were a couple of unpleasantnesses on hpslash, but I was peripheral to them at best.
Meanwhile, nmws of the movie was coming out; I was highly doubtful of the idea, but surrendered when the casting of Alan Rickman was confirmed. I love Alan Rickman, and the idea of him playing Snape was too much for me to resist. So I decided to see the film, but only for Rickman. I was in no hurry and waited for a month after it came out so I could see it with my mom. Aside from Rickman, I was none too impressed, then I went through a period where I thought I liked it. The day it came out on DVD, my manager, a fellow fan, actually let me leave work to run across the street to where I'd reserved my copy of the DVD. And I've watched it maybe once since. It's just . . . not a very good movie. Actually, I think it's kind of boring. I think the best thing about it was that it converted my best friend, Amanda. She adored the movie and promptly set out to read the books, and now I suspect she's a bigger fan than I am.
I lost touch with the fandom, not out of lack of interest, but simply because I found new obsessions that took up my time. I remember when Chelle left the list in Little Alex's hands, which was cool with me because Alex is a good friend of mine. In fact, when she gave up running it, she offered it to me! I believe my reaction ran somewhere along the lines of "oh god no," but more polite. When I returned to the list eventually, I had to send an e-mail confirming my age (finally legal) to a total stranger, and that was just weird.
So I was late catching up with news of the next movie. This is silly, because my favourite character for years has been Gilderoy Lockhart and I was very worried about how the movie would treat him. The casting of Kenneth Branagh did not allay my fears (probably because I didn't hear the Hugh Grant rumours until after the fact; I woudl have felt much better about Branagh if I'd known that). After all, in my ignorant Americanhood, I only knew Branagh from our required-by-law viewing of his Hamlet in sophomore year. So my view was this: "Wait, the Hamlet guy? The Hamlet is playing Gilderoy? WHY?!" I decided there should be a rule: Hamlet cannot play Gilderoy Lockhart. All the while, mind you, I was praying that I would be wrong and that Branagh would make me eat my words.
Like a dutiful little fan, I bought my tickets a week in advance and dragged a friend along on opening day, arriving at least two or three hours early. The first viewing was EXTREMELY interesting, as I had made the fatal mistake of going out to see The Ring the night before, and as a result I was very jumpy and running on two hours' sleep. And caffeine. A lot of caffeine.
I was colossally relieved to see that Gilderoy had indeed been treated fairly by all involved (except for the smack on the head with the rock, like, what the hell was that?) and the Hamlet guy was indeed up to the task. Whew. I was so pleased with him for not sucking that I sought out more of his work and . . . well, I'll let the eight Kenneth Branagh movies I now own speak for themselves.
I saw CoS six times in the theatre, which was at least once too many, because I got so sick of it that I still haven't bought it. I am still not ready to sit through the year-long spider scene and the century-long basilisk scene, to say nothing of the exposition, yet again.
Which I believe brings me up to the announcement of OotP's release date. I saved that clipping.
I wasn't as hysterically excited as I was for the fourth book; actually, I was kind of in shock. I'd started half-believing that there would never be another book, and after three years of waiting that semi-belief took a while to shift. I reserved my copy, of course, and finally the day came. June twenty-first. As I still live with my mom and don't have my license (I'm working on it, I swear), she was my ride, and she was kind enough to agree to get up at a ridiculous hour so that we could take the hour-long ride to the mall and get my book just as it opened for business. This makes up for that strawberry thing a million times over. My sister - who, by the way, finally got into the books a couple of months ago and has breezed through them at an amazing rate for nonreader like herself (somehow, she even got to the end of PoA without getting spoiled about Sirius being a good guy; I was so happy) - came with us because she wanted to go clothes shopping. Clothes shopping for her is quite an endeavour, so I got to spend three happy hours in the Borders café blissfully reading away.
Read the entire book that day, in about eleven hours, barely stopping for food and only reluctantly stopping for bathroom visits. I was overwhelmed when I got to the bit with Gilderoy. You see, I had long since resigned myself to the fact that he was a bit character at best and, now that he had been properly disposed of, we would never see him again and probably never hear much about him either. I was willing to settle for even a tiny throwaway sentence about his current status, but doubted I'd get even that much. And then a whole scene! I had to put down the book for a minute to gather myself, and I would have cried for joy except that my sister (reading CoS nearby) was already looking at me as if I had three heads. So the entire actual point of the scene was totally lost on me - Neville who? Longbottom what? - and now I have hope, dammit. Hope that he might show up again. Hope is a treacherous beast.
And by the time I got to the end, my brain was so tired that I simply didn't cry. And I haven't really cried since. I was stunned for about a week and kept almost crying whenever the realization renewed itself, but no tears. And I'd like to state for the record that I want Sirius to stay dead. I'm sick of character death and there's the grief and then, oh, he's not dead after all! I really hate that. It's cheap and stupid.
So I was back in HP fandom for a while, and then one day I went to see Pirates of the Caribbean and, well, my focus has shifted slightly. I'm kind of fickle. I'll go back, though; I always do.
I wonder how long we'll wait for the next book?
I can't believe it took me an hour and a half to write that. The heck with proofreading for typos.