One bloke did the same thing to me in college, except it was Harry/McGonagall porn . A byproduct of sitting in the library one time reading a fic and him using the first two names he could find on the page to try and embarrass me .

Also, my best friend at that time was a prolific slash writer >_>. She was the one who really brought the obsession out into the public eye.

 

I agree with you there and who doesn't, that's why you eat lunch in the band hall.

 

Private for me. I'm a pretty normal guy irl and it's never come up in conversation. People do wonder how I can remember so many tiny details about HP, but they don't know that I read those details every day.

Not many people outside of FF know things like Sirius' dad's name.

 

Lol, reminds me of the last film. Went with a group and when asked my thoughts on it, I blurted out, "Neville shouldn't have been in NEWT potions, and Romilda was in that scene and she's a 4th year."

I got funny looks.

 

Private.
SRS BUSINEES.

Yeah no one really knows and those that do just shrug and say everyone has their quirks.

 

Meh private in that I dont really make any effort to hide it but I dont spread it around either, also a fair few of my friends know I like it but I only ever talk about it when I feel like using that knowledge to irritate them by hitting on their girlfriends who write fanfiction.

 

You can't just leave it like that! =D. Pray tell what sort of hints?

 

My elder brother knows about it, we got into the stuff together, ages ago. We had one computer, and being the geniuses that 10 and 12 year olds are, we decided to look for the 5th book online a year or two before it came out. Some guy advertised Jack Ryans Harry Potter and the Green Flame Torch on Portkey as it, and we read that. Figured out that the site had tonnes more stories, and that wasn't the real one, and instead got into the fandom.

Outside of him, I keep it rather private, but if I know someone who reads it as well I'll talk openly about it. The best example of this was last year around this time, at my friend's birthday. While everything was dying down, me and a few friends were lying on the trampoline and got into talking about it. Turns out there were 3 girls in my grade who were into it. One's a Draco/Hermione shipper, the other a suspected slash fangirl, which turned into an inside joke, and the last a Harry/Ginny shipper. Was a fun time, I never talked about my nerdier stuff back then (Nowadays I'm pretty open about the more Asian parts of my nerdiness).
Amy, the person who was hosting the party, which was a suprise one for another friend, was a big Harry Potter fan too. She wasn't part of the conversation but I suspected she was a fanfic reader as well. Tried dropping some subtle hints, like when she asked me what I'd be doing if I wasn't hear I replied I would be on my computer, as always, lurking DLP. Didn't get the reference, maybe I wasn't obvious enough. Muttered, "Oh yeah, new Denarian Lord chapter today..." She didn't get it.
Fuck, are we some sort of super underground part of the hardcore underground world of Harry Potter fanfiction?

 

Haha, I always get funny looks when a new HP movie comes out and I complain about every single difference with canon. Even without being Taure, reading FF kinda makes you a canon god amongst HP fans. And weird.

 

Sekrit. Seeing as how I've met Jon in RL and I don't think we ever mentioned FF at all, DLP a little but yeah, it isn't something to bring up in RL. And now a person from RL I met ages ago has joined DLP. I still don't think HP FF is a very RL worthy topic. It's just a hobby you keep in the closet, like listening to your guilty pleasure music.

 

You see, it's funny, 'cause it's a well-known fact that I write and spend enormous amounts of time on the computer, but nobody actually knows what I write. Some people very much want to read my work too, like family and a few friends (I tell them I'm writing a legal/political/crime thriller whenever I'm referring to Renegade Cause).

Only two people in RL who know the truth are my ex-girlfriend (who writes Mercedes Lackey-verse fanfiction) and my soon-to-be-girlfriend, who caught me with DLP on my desktop when she came to my room to, uh, visit.

 

There are very few people around here who even read Harry Potter books, not to mention fanfiction in english language, so I don't advertise it. However, I once met a girl a few years ago who did, but she turned out Harry/Draco shipper, and a fan of Snape, so our conversation about Potterverse didn't last long :-/.

 

Damn, I haven't read the whole topic, but am I the only one who doesn't mind sharing this habbit with other people? haha

I've been reading fanfiction since 2004, so most of my friends know about it (they used to make fun of me 4 years ago, but they just accepted it). My girlfriend also knows about it and she doesn't really care as long as I don't stop going out and doing normal stuff - of course I would never stop doing anything over fanfiction. lol.

And from time to time when Harry Potter subject pops up in the conversation, I have no qualms about stating some awesome fanfiction I've read. My friends laugh and some even tried getting into fandom, but that didn't really work. Especially since most of them can't speak english and brazilian fanfiction suuuucks big time. Authors can't speak portuguese =(

 

I do, but it's pretty well known that my life's ambition is to own a library, so it's considered one of my less nerdy tendencies.

 

I only tell some friends who are HP fans and to my best friend who kept asking what was I doing online all the time. Like everyone else I also had to start explaining how I knew specific details about HP. I really don't care, if you ask I'll tell.

 

Another good question is: how many of you started off your fanfiction reading career with HP? Or, how long have you been reading fanfiction?

I started reading Ranma 1/2 fanfiction when I was like 10 or 11 (was already into anime), sometime around 1998 or 1999, which was when Ranma had pretty much reached it's height of popularity on the internet and many great authors were pumping out novel length fics. I vividly remember reading some random Ranma fic right when the turn of the millennium happened. I was pretty nerdy even back then.

I swear I was so obsessed with Ranma fanfiction that I must have read a few thousand of them; pretty much the entire contents of the rec.arts.animation.etc.etc. group and the various other Ranma fanfic archives.

Then I got into other anime fanfiction such as Tenchi, Yu Yu Hakusho, and Sailor Moon, after I had ploughed through most of the Ranma content.

It wasn't until I had already read like the second or third HP book that I actively started reading HP fanfiction. I think this was sometime around 2003, but I can't be sure as that's just a rough estimate.

So yeah, I was reading fanfiction for some years before I discovered HP, but ever since then, HP has captured the bulk of my attention. Right now I pretty much only read HP and Naruto fanfiction, with the occasional fic or crossover involving some other anime fandom.

How about you guys?

 

I actually started off reading Digimon fanfiction. Mainly due to the fact that after Adventure 02 and the massive trolling that was pretty much everything that wasn't Wargreymon vs. Blackwargreymon or any scene with TK in it. Oh and because of the Matt thing, all I will say is that it was the most epic trolling ever. I would later start reading NGE followed by Zelda. Also around this time I was reading Digimon Tamers fanfiction because I was dissatisfied with the Digital Hazard and it's lack of explaination just made me think "dropped plotline".

A few years later and I started reading Naruto fanfiction and about a year later I finally started HP and here we are now about a year after starting HP fanficiton.

 

I started reading Star Wars. Then Harry Potter. Outside those are stories which don’t require much knowledge of the fandom.