Hi!

My name is Carolin and I am writing my BA thesis on Harry Potter Fan Ficiton. Thus, I'm looking for interesting fan fiction stories that are either very common in terms of style and format or that address particular issues such as current political and social issues. Any recommendations?

Do you think that fan fiction writers address current issues deliberately in their texts?

I am also looking for some writers that would answer me some more questions! If you would have the time to do so, just raise your voice and I'll send you a PM.

Thank you!

 

I'm going to butcher this quote I heard once.

Interviewer "Do you think Collage discourages writers?"

Famous writer "I don't think it discourages enough"

 

Politically, a lot of HP fanfiction (and in fact, canon itself) seems to paint the Ministry and the Wizengamot in a really awful light. The characterizations Fudge and Umbridge are often extrapolated across the government as a whole, which is usually prejudiced, incompetent, corrupt, downright evil, or more often all four at once.

I think you could get a lot of mileage connecting the negative way the Wizarding government is depicted in canon and to an even greater extent in fanfic to the general dissatisfaction that people (especially young people) tend to have with real world governments.

Even more generally, the HP fanfic community as a whole really seems to hate authority. The Independent Harry genre and the Dumbledore bashing that pervades large portions of the fandom are a substantial departure from canon. Dumbledore tends to take a lot of blame for questionable decisions he made, and his worse qualities get exaggerated even as his better ones are ignored or eroded away. In Dumbledore-bashfests he tends to be handled in a very similar way to how the Wizarding Government is handled in more reasonable stories, which is pretty interesting now that I think of it. (Dumbledore is of course a pretty central figure in Wizarding government, but a lot of the time he isn't automatically folded in with all their willful evil and outrageous incompetence.)

 

I'm curious about your planned methodology for this study. There's a lot of Harry Potter fanfiction out there, with 713,000 HP stories on Fanfiction.Net alone.

If you're going to speak about fanfiction in general, then surely you're going to have to have detailed information about a statistically significant sample of those stories. But I can't imagine what information that would be: stuff like themes are subjective, qualitative and would require close reading to discover, which isn't really practical with a statistically significant sample. Worse, you could take a random sample of 1000 Harry Potter stories off Fanfiction.Net and not have a single well-written story worth talking about in the mix.

The only way to find the stories worth talking about (i.e. the cream of the very bad crop) is to be deliberately selective. But as soon as you do that, you lose all ability to talk about fanfiction in general, or trends within fanfiction.

 

My Immortal is a must, it's a crash course on typical bad fanfiction blunders, has famously mysterious origins, spawned fanfictions of fanfictions of itself, is it a parody or is it for real, etc. Really funny in a sick way, you can play any number of drinking games to add to the fun

http://myimmortalrehost.webs.com

 

I always understood the majority of FanFics as teenage girls trying to figure out a lot of things.

1. Crushes, by making Harry (or Draco, or whatever guy looks reasonably like their crush) fall in love with some perfect version of themselves.

2. Crushing on a teacher, by making Snape a sex-god who falls in love with "Hermione."

3. Liking the idea of sex while dealing with the prude/slut double standards of society, by writing themselves as Harry and just making him a girl that happens to have a penis, as seen in a majority of Slash Fics.

4. As a follow-up to the last one, teenage pregnancy, with "Harry" (and always "Harry") getting pregnant. I'm almost tempted to say there's a weird pro-life message in there, judging by how Mpregs never dare use abortions and a certain book that also features a weird pro-life message (Twilight), but it's not a good idea to look for political stuff in that monstrosity.

5. Independence and rebelling against authority, also known as the source of Indy Harry and Dumbledore/Ministry Bashing.

6. Fitting into popular culture, or at least what they think is popular culture. Which is why they give Draco leather pants.

7. Wanting to simply become the next Rowling or Stephanine Meyer by writing something "original."

I could probably come up with some more stuff, but you get the idea.

 

HP us one of the biggest fandoms there are. I think that a thesis on HP fanfiction in general is setting yourself up for too tremendous amount of work for one person to handle. I'd say you should narrow your approach. Somehow.

Like others have said, few people write fanfiction with the specific goal of discussing particular issues. Most ff authors write because they want to. There are stories that try to be serious or educational, but the unfortunate truth is that the most prominent of them is MoR and if you start with that one, you're doing it wrong.

In short, the best HP fanfiction comes from authors simply wanting to tell a story, not from attempts to tackle issues, whatever they may be.

 

If you're doing research please figure try and figure out why there is so much more homosexuality in fan fiction than the source material, original fiction in general or indeed the world at large.

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Also something to study that might not be too difficult would be crossover interests.

What different fandoms are in a user's favorites list what relationships are there.

It would just involve some data mining and you could probably make a really pretty network graph.

 

That one's actually pretty simple, as long as you remember most FanFiction writers are teenage girls. It boils down to two things:

1. They like writing Slash for the same reason most teenage boys like lesbians. Need I say more.

2. Thanks to the lovely double standards of society that says women are either prudes or sluts, they explore their sexuality in FanFics by simply writing themselves as Harry. In almost every Slash Fic out there, odds are it's really a Girl "Harry", described as extremely feminine, who just so happens to have a penis. It also goes a long way to understanding that monstrosity known as Mpreg.

 

Doing a study based on that would be fascinating. Possibly worthy of a BA Thesis.

 

That's a dark journey down a long, winding road.

 

A dark, warm, wet journey.

 

Sort of the low hanging fruit here, pun intended, you could always look at sexism in fanfiction. Given that most fanfic writers are teenage girls - maybe look at how they choose to portray men? And how male authors choose to portray women. You'll find a lot of idealization goes on in both cases. If you choose to take a random sampling, this might be the easiest sort of trend to decipher.

 

Well... The archive my school uses has an essay of Faith/Buffy femslash fics, so it apparently can be done. Best of luck.

 

Spealing of sexism. What about harem fics? It does form a significant portion of most fandoms not just HP. The popularity of these fics while baffling is something which can be explored.