The World of Fan Fiction

I’ve been a fan of the Harry Potter series since I was 8 years old. I’ve read the series too many times to count, I have posters, games, dolls, jewelry, you name it. But surprisingly, I’ve never engaged with fan fiction. Not just Harry Potter fanfiction, but for any fandom.

Honestly, I’m not really sure why I never did. I guess for starters, I didn’t even know where to begin to find the “good” ones. There’s just infinitely many across all different websites, I had to idea how to tackle it. However, I also just never really even felt the need to read fan fiction. My mindset was stuck into thinking that if I wanted to read about Harry Potter, I’d just read the books themselves.

This week, I was forced into reading a fan fiction and I found that I absolutely loved it. At first, I was weary of this assignment because like I said, I had never ventured into fan fiction before. I started by just straight-up googling “Best Harry Potter fanfiction”. Lucky for me, a link came up titled “21 Harry Potter Fan Fictions to Read Before You Die”, which I felt sounded pretty promising.

Scrolling through, I was immediately surprised by the length of most of the stories; Some of them are longer than the books themselves! I always knew there were some long fanfics but I never imagined they were longer than Order of the Phoenix! I also noticed that most of them revolved around ships, mainly either Draco and Harry, Harry and Hermione, or Hermione and Draco. I thought this was interesting because Draco is supposed to be one of the villains of the series. These fan fictions turned him into either the protagonist trying to get his crush or becoming the love interest of the protagonist. He took on a completely different role from what he portrays in the books, even if he still had a lot of the same character qualities.

The fanfiction I chose was about a ship, but it was about Lily and James. I found this one interesting because it expanded on Harry’s parents' life which we know minimal things about. It allowed the author to implement so many different ideas into the world and have so much more freedom by writing about Lily and James rather than Harry and his friends.

We already know so much about the golden trio that writing fan fiction about them could become difficult. It’s hard to stay true to what is in the actual Harry Potter canon while still creating your own storyline. When writing about secondary characters however, it would allow the author so much more creative freedom while still staying in line with the actual books. I loved the fanfic I chose (“The Queen of the Crunk”) because it gave an idea into what Hogwarts was like so many years ago. I loved being able to see how the author imagined the marauders were in school, as well as tying in so many other characters such as Alice and Frank Longbottom. It was so interesting to see how the author imagined characters to be that we really only ever heard very little about.

Overall, this week opened my eyes up to so many more possibilities involving the Harry Potter fandom. I was never against fan fiction, I just never thought it was for me. However, this assignment changed my mind. I’m excited to dive deeper into more Harry Potter fan fiction and see how people imagine the wizarding world past just what J.K. Rowling has given us. I guess the magic of Harry Potter never truly has to end.