An Overview of Harry Potter FanFiction

As anyone who never wanted a particular book or movie to end can attest, fanfiction has been around a long time. And while currently we generally think of it as a pop-culture phenomenon of the Internet, fanfiction has always existed wherever there are stories to be told; Milton's Paradise Lost, for example, can easily be considered fanfiction. Philip Pullman's recent trilogy, His Dark Materials, is hence fanfiction based on fanfiction. Now that I've justified the existence of fanfiction in 75 words, it's time for a guide through my own fannish favorite - the world of Harry Potter.

There are many reasons why there's so much Harry Potter fanfiction out there, besides the obvious fact that the books and movies are wildly popular. The fact that the universe is magical is easier for man fanfiction writers to work with - logistical problems annoying to write in other fandoms can be solved with spells, owls and house elves. On a more basic level, because the books are ultimately children's books but have a huge adult following, many readers are interested in plot aspects that either aren't focused on because they're not the central part of the story, or because such material would be either uninteresting to the true target audience, or inappropriate (If you're reading this article you probably already know you can't really talk about fanfiction without talking about porn, but we'll get to that later). Certainly when your favorite character isn't Harry Potter, Ron Weasley or Hermione Granger, JK Rowling often provides you will less than you'd like to know. Hence speculation, and while some people theorize, others create. This fanfiction phenomenon is only helped along by the infrequency of the release dates for the books and movies. We have a lot of down time while waiting to see what happens next, and much Harry Potter fanfiction falls into the category of hypothesis.

The lack of frequency of official Harry Potter material though, can also make following the world of fanfiction very hard. Because the Harry Potter series itself is so epic (how many thousands of pages has JK Rowling written at this point?), many fanfiction writers take on stories of tremendous scope, that either don't get finished, or don't get finished before the next book in the series is released. As such there are hundreds of alternate Harry Potter fanfiction worlds branching from the conclusion of each novel. If you can't stand that certain characters have died or loyalties have seemed to shift, there's always a way to backtrack in fanfiction to solve the problem and have access to the story you want.

Because of the wide audience for Harry Potter, its fanfiction falls into more categories of endeavor than does the fanfiction for many other popular books and movies. Here's a basic primer to the type of stuff that is out there, and where I am familiar with it, some recommendations, which I will confess are somewhat dictated by my own character interests which will become clear.

While hardly the most popular category of fanfiction related to the Harry Potter universe out there - both in terms of what people are reading and writing - Gen (standing for general) fanfiction is probably the easiest place to start. While gen fanfiction may not be appropriate for kids (most people do put age guidelines on their stories of all stripes), gen cleaves closer to JK Rowling's world and focus usually by simply trying to advance the story of he battle between good and evil (Hogwarts/The Order of the Phoenix vs. The Death Eaters and Voldemort). Some gen fanfiction stories take place after the battle has been decided or exist mainly to flesh out the culture and sociology of the wizarding world (which many feel JK Rowling has left a number of gaping holes in, which is a boon to fanfiction writers, but can be annoying to those who only follow Harry Potter book and movie cannon). Based on what the rest of the fanfiction universe looks like, Gen fanfiction can largely be defined by what it is not. Gen fanfiction stories don't focus on relationships, rarely contain sex and rarely focus on non-cannon relationships - so Harry / Ginny or Ron / Hermione might be mentioned, but no one is trying to figure out much about Minerva McGonagall's personal life in these things.

One of my favorite Harry Potter gen fanfiction stories, which stretches the boundaries of the genre to a certain degree, but has brilliant characterization, a distinctly peculiar sense of humor and does a great deal to fill in the details on wizarding society is Jacquez's The Sorcerer's Apprentice in which Harry Potter becomes Severus Snape's apprentice. It is unfortunately a work in (very slow) progress, but it's a fine bit of writing that can be found at http://www.dementia.org/~jacquez/writing/hpfic/sorcerers_apprentice/index2.html. Updates on what is going on with the series (also infrequent) can be found at: http://community.livejournal.com/sorcerers_app/
This reference will make no sense to you now, but read if it only for the tiny sheep. It's one of my favorite odd Harry Potter fanfiction details of all time (and it even has an illustration to go with it).

Of course, just as we want to know about the personal lives of celebrities, we all want to know about the personal lives of the famous and fictional as well, which brings us to the blindingly popular and occasionally scary romance genre of Harry Potter fanfiction. This genre actually splits down into several more categories and sub-categories. Again, if you've been reading fanfiction for a while, you can probably skip this paragraph, although you may be amused by the reminder of fannish idiosyncrasies. Here are only some of the many, many ways in which one can divide the romance genre in the world of Harry Potter fanfiction.

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• Het - These fanfiction stories feature heterosexual romance that takes place between characters that may or may not stand any chance of getting together in the actual cannon of Harry Potter.
  
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• Slash - These fanfiction stories generally feature male homosexual relations again between characters that may or may not stand a reasonable chance of getting together in the Harry Potter universe. (While there are no explicitly gay characters in Harry Potter cannon, there are reasonable and varyingly scholarly arguments that posit the homosexuality of a number of characters including Snape, Lupin, Black and Pettigrew).
  
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• Femme Slash - Yes lesiban relationships get their own special category in the world of fanfiction. This is probably the least common of the three orientation focuses in fan fiction, but actually ascertaining the numbers is somewhat difficult, because some authors prefer to just call this slash as well. Certainly, there's a lot less to work with in Harry Potter cannon in this regard.
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It should also be noted that some Harry Potter fanfiction stories feature both slash and het pairings and there is a growing phenomena of polyamorous situations in Harry Potter fan fiction (which is easily the subject for an entirely separate article). Additionally MPREG fanfiction stories, that is where a male is pregnant occur both in the slash and het fanfiction genres.

Romance fanfiction in Harry Potter is often frequently broken up by pairing or OTP (which stands for One True Pairing, meaning the only relationship a given fan wants to read about). Some pairings are more popular than others for reasons ranging from overt canonical justification (Ron / Hermione) and implied canonical justification (Sirius / Remus - and yes those "'shippers" do have all sorts of theories to address the "Tonks situation") to stuff that only makes sense when you look at it from an angle extraordinarily different from those of the books, i.e., Hermione and Snape could conceivably have a lot to talk about and it is all so terribly Wuthering Heights. Meanwhile, Harry and Draco are so obsessed with what the other is up to… maybe that's not about what we think it's about. Of course, sometimes it's just about "oh, the pretty."

In the land of Harry Potter fanfiction OTPs one will also run across OFCs and OMCs - that is, Original Female Characters and Original Male Characters. While these are often looked down upon for being Mary Sues (that is idealized versions of the self sloppily inserted into a story in the name of poorly written wish fulfillment), some of them are really brilliant and do develop followings of their own. Viviane Chance, who can be found in several of the humor and romance stories over at Witchfics.org is an excellent example. Popular Harry Potter fanfiction pairings for romance stories rated G to NC-17 include:

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• Harry / Hermione
  
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• Ron / Hermione
  
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• Snape / Hermione
  
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• Hermione / Draco
  
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• Harry / Ginny
  
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• Harry / Draco
  
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• Harry / Ron
  
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• Harry / Snape (god help us all, sometimes abbreviated as Snarry)
  
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• Sirius / Remus
  
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• Remus / Tonks
  
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• Ginny / Tom Riddle (or Voldemort or the diary or whatever)
  
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• Harry / OFC
  
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• Harry / OMC
  
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• Snape / OFC
  
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• Snape / OMC
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Despite this list though, there are truly fanfiction stories of every pairing you can possibly imagine. Some, like Severus / Lucius are just less popular but have rabid followings. Other pairings exist specifically because people search out the obscure to experiment with (Ollivander figures heartbreakingly in a number of obscure tales). As to the logic of how pairings are named, I can't really help you. People almost always say Harry / Draco and not Draco / Harry; Snape is sometimes Snape and sometimes Severus depending on who he's paired with; and the smashing names together thing is just one more fun filled abuse of the English language, I suppose.

Fanfiction romance stories can also be subdivided by tonal quality and situational intent from "hook up" or "first time" stories focusing on how two characters get together to Angst (in which there is lots of fighting before the happily ever after), Drama (in which a plotline, usually non-romantic is the focus of the story until the characters realize their feelings for each other) and Hurt/Comfort in which characters are drawn together as one is forced to care for the other.

In the realm of Harry Potter romance fanfiction with a heavy dose of Drama, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Sushi, who writes mainly Snape / Harry fanfiction is a master. She's a good writer who is serious about plot. Her Civil War series is wildly popular and can be found at http://www.societyhappens.com/sushi/. Also worth your time while on her site is the dark, but brilliantly constructed In Academia which takes us back to Snape's student days. I can't emphasize enough that this story is unsettling, but if you want a good fanfiction weeper with some incredibly complex character development and some odd moments of humor, I'm not sure you can do better than this tale.

Also deeply worthy of your time in the fanfiction romance department are the three novel-length fanfics by Anna of Witchfics.org. Starting with Roman Holiday, followed by Jewel of the Nile and concluding with the as yet unfinished Last Tango in Paris, Anna provides us with a smart, self-assured Hermione who through an ambitious project in her final year at Hogwarts and a series of adventures afterwards winds up in two very complicated relationships (one with Draco and one with Snape), gets married (to Bill Weasley) and winds up wearing Voldemort as a piece of jewelry. This is romance fanfiction with an incredible plot at the genre's absolute best. The story begins here http://www.witchfics.org/anna/romanholiday/index.html

Overlapping to a certain degree with the Harry Potter fanfiction romance category is the porn category. Here one can look at the NC-17 romance stories (plot heavy pieces about relationship situations that eventually pay off with some very adult moments), plot-heavy fanfiction stories with lots of sex that aren't romances (this ranges from comfort between friends to very dark non-consensual plotlines) and stories that are just about the porn - or PWPs (that stands for Porn Without Plot, because really, sometimes you just want people to shut the hell up and get on with it). Popular pairings here are about the same as the list above, but there's probably more slash than het. The polyamoury (and just plain orgy) trend continues here as well. Deviance of all sorts is popular in the smutty realms of fanfiction, although that mainly seems to involve BDSM plotlines featuring Slytherin characters or incest plotlines involving the Weasleys (particularly the twins, often referred to as Weasleycest) or the Malfoys (because they're generally assumed to be deranged anyway). For an example of just how weird it can get, you might want to check our Mousewrite's Corvus Fallere which involves Voldemort's victory, Snape, Ron, Harry and Hermione and some creepy bird-like creatures who speak in a weird clicking language. It's both utterly strange and very, very porny, and has a huge following, but I'm certainly not sure I can describe it any better than that. You can check it out at http://www.livejournal.com/tools/memories.bml?user=mousewrites&keyword=CF&filter=all

Finally, we come to the humor category, which I've left for last because much of it is self-referential send-ups of the other Harry Potter fanfiction categories listed from MST3K send-ups of existing fics, to comically intended porn between unlikeliest of Harry Potter characters (e.g., Squid / Castle) to oddly handled jokes about everything from the ineptitude of the Death Eaters to the Mary Sue Phenomena, both of which feature heavily in Grindylowe's truly indescribable, obscene, offensive and very, very funny Death Eaters at the Malfoy Estate which can be found at http://www.geocities.com/grindylowe/fanfic.html. In this story, there's a puppet that talks like Samuel Jackson in Pulp Fiction, an assistant to Snape named Myra Psue and a great deal of drug development and use.

If you haven't been scarred for life by reading this and want to explore the very weird world of Harry Potter fanfiction, your best place to start is Google. Type in fanfiction and the characters you care about, and any number of offerings should emerge. Livejournal also has dozens of communities dedicated to Harry Potter fanfiction of every variety so it's easy to find yourself a place to read only the stuff you're interested in and comfortable with.

Several large scale fanfiction archives exist for Harry Potter. Fanfiction.net, while the most widely known (and harbors the fanfiction of hundreds of other pop-culture phenomena) is probably the lowest in quality and the most overrun with Mary Sue's and poor writing.

Fiction Alley (http://www.fictionalley.org/) is great because it presents such a broad range of high quality Harry Potter fanfiction stories divided up into several groupings that include The Dark Arts (home to dark and angsty fics, Schnoogle, home to novel-length fics, The Astronomy Tower, home of romance fan fiction and Ridikulus for humor fics. Fics here don't, I believe, go above an R rating. For adult Harry Potter fanfiction materials you'll want to wander on over to The Restricted Section (http://www.restrictedsection.org). which requires age-verification and is restricted to those over 18.

Happy reading and please feel free to add your own Harry Potter fanfiction recommendations in the comments section.