NY Times on the HP Fandom, Redux

[heidi]

It's not the first time they've written about the HP fandom, or HP slash, but it is the first time they've put "fanfic" in quotes as if it's not a real "thing".

And I wanted to discuss the the Potterwars situation (which was going on just as I came info fandom), which I've been trying to write about for a long time because it happened when fandom was extremely small compared to how it grew as the films were announced and GoF: The Book was released.

It was a significant moment for many of us who were fandom newbies - inspiration for us to tell the corporation no, we aren't going to mark all our fics with gay characters as R-rated - but the perspectives encapsulated in the article were very, very limited. There is an interesting oral history of the HP fandom, but this NY Times article isn't it.

If you want to read the article, it's here.

Comments

[flourish]

Oh, come on - this is not so bad. It's a short article! Among other things, I think that their quotation marks around "fanfic" are probably more to do with individual editors being weird. I agree that it's not exhaustive, but oh well, right?

[heidi]

On the website it's relatively small and minor but in the paper, which is where I saw it first, it's the cover story on Arts & Leisure with the top half of the page full of photos supplied by WB, Scholastic, Bloomsbury & Universal. Some have fans in the pics but not one is *of* fandom or fan creativity, so my starting point in reading it was initially negative.