Well, let's just hope she'll limit it to only the first couple of years. Meh, big business could come in handy in this case. Companies who own the licences will preassure her to leave the whole thing open, so they could keep exploiting it.

 

I predict a surge in kitchenware!Harry stories. There are so many ways to kill a Dark Lord, after JKR predictably uses an AK (hate based spell powered by love?), we'll see a surge in alternative deaths.

The power of love is a crock of bovine waste that would never fly except these are "children's stories." Let's all hope for some originality.

 

Fanfiction will definitely slow down as more and more people drop it, if Rowling kills off Harry or Ginny, the authors will write stories where one of the characters goes back and saves him or her.

If however (and i hate to think of the consequences) she lets them live, then stories about Ron having 12 kids with Harry and Ginny having 22 cause thats what harry had always wished, to have a big loving family

But Au and time travel will defiantly rise and hopefully something good may come out of all of this.

 

I think a lot of Harry in Auror training stories might come up as well.

 

I doubt the fangirls will leave the fandom soon. There are so many of them who seem not to have read large parts of the books but prefer to wait for the films. Understandable - it is way easier. You sit in a comfy armchair, you don't need to turn pages, and there aren't these annoying black symbols which the thing between the ears has to put together and to translate into real pictures.

So as long as there are those films the fandom will be filled with fangurlz. And we all are young enough to live to see two or three remakes, a tv-series, some anime and cartoon crap, some spin-offs, ... the industry will try everything to keep the cash cow alive.

If not ... some other woman appears out of nowhere with a novel about a poor kid with some special abilities who doesn't know anything about his destiny until one day ...



If book seven is great it will inspire a lot of people. If it is as bad as HBP then most serious authors will continue where OotP stops and continue to ignore books six and seven.

I believe for most authors the end of OotP will remain the best point to start an AU. Over the last year there have been as much new AU six year stories written as seven year stories - if you don't count the huge amount of Post HBP oneshots.



Fangirls and book seven:

Even if the epilogue covers the rest of the live of the protagonists those fg-s who actually read the books will be thrilled to fill the gaps of the epilogue with uninspired pieces of fluffy trash. Especially ff.net will be flooded with more or less detailed descriptions of 'Harry's and Ginny's Honeymoon' (quite a few fics will bare exact this title), the first filled diapher of their first kid, the first words of their second kid, the first steps of ... you get the picture.

HarryHermione, HarryRon, DracoGinny, and HarryDraco fangirls will describe word by word how their characters suffer not being allowed to shag their true soulmates and finally finding a way to secretly bang each other none the less. If JKR does the unthinkable and barbarously murders Draco then there will surely appear some long lost hidden twin - male or female or hermaphrodite and of course multi-part Veela.

Fandom will slow down a bit after one or two years - and then it is up to the merchandising industry to keep it alive.

The long lasting effect and the literary value of the series will become clear when or if in fifty years they are still as well known as LOTR is known and read today.

 

The thing is, that fangirls are drawn to the here and now, not the past. Intelligent folk remember the things they like, but fangirls only remember what is talked about in "insert magazine name here" or at school or whatever.

Harry Potter does have a large fangirl following, but it also has a huge number of intelligent followers, ie most of the members here. The fangirls will move on when the next series with a hunk or two who need to fuck each other comes out, but a good number of intelligent folk will stay around, wanting to find a better ending to the series.

 

Much as I'd love this to happen, we all have to remember that whilst in fandom HP can be anything from fluffy crap to gritty, realistic stuff, HP cannon, is, first and foremost a childrens (or teenagers) fantasy story, ergo all must be well at the end.

No matter how much we want there to be a bittersweet ending life real life, there will (in my opinion anyway) be a big fairytale ending, with maybe a few bit-players dieing (Seamus and Dean, Susan Bones, Hannah Abbot, Hestia Jones - the ones we always mention in passing).

That's my view anyway.

Refering to the topic at hand, I can certainly see fandom dieing off. We've seen it with HBP, noone wants to write what happens next (though this is probably because all Post-HBP stories have to involve a wild search for Horcruxes). Maybe it's just me being pedantic, but we all read fanfiction to either write how it should happen, or to come up with theories as to what might happen.

The exploration fics designed to discuss theories of the next book will die off, but I think there will be some book7 rewrites and, of course, the inevitable next-generation fics. I also think there will be an influx of Founders era fiction - We see it in the LOTR fandom - people writing fics dealing with pre-cannon topics.

lol, that was a rather long post for me, I'm impressed

 

Well hopefully there are a bunch of stories that follow right after book 7 with harry snapping and realizing that he is a pussy and that Ginny is an ugly slut.

So he becomes the next Dark Lord or just leaves.

 

JKR seems to want to end the series. I wonder if she can. If/when she passes away the copywrites will go to her family,right? I would have a hard time turning down a pile of money to revive my mothers great work. Shades of VC Andrews.

 

but the problem remains, can her family revive the old flair that Rowling caused when she wrote the books? i mean who knows if her family are at all good writers so that comment is completely pointless. You could make shitty Harry potter remakes worst than the ones now, it does not mean you will earn any money.

 

SushiZ, you are half right.
I was a great star trek fan, and let me tell you there are many Shitty
star trek paperbacks written.
I think the Harry Potter name would survive quite a beating.

 

Ak, I really hope this doesn't happen. That'd be awful!

I'm curious about all of you now. Can you see yourself still in the HP fanfic ring, say, two years from now? Five years from now? Twenty?

I'm sure I'll be here at least till the seventh book come out. But from then? ... I really can't see myself sticking around for that much longer. RL and all.

 

Of course it will indeed depend on real life and if there'll appear something similar or better.

But ...

The seventh movie will probably be released in 2010. I think most of the fandom will last until then, and I'm sure I myself will be a part at least until then.

And then there's a great chance that over the next decade(s) the HP fandom will be as strong as Tolkien's fandom. And as long as there are good fanfic's I will continue to read them.

+++

some statistics:

I just looked through ff.net's directory. LotR has 312 stories with more than 100.000 words and 35.656 stories altogether, way more than all other book-related fandoms except HP with 1571 > 100.000 words and 222.529 stories altogether (English language, 9.40 a.m. GMT + 2)

In ff.net's anime section only Naruto and Yu Gi Oh contain more stories than LotR, Naruto has even 43.990 stories. But both have less really long stories than LotR. I assume: More short stories = more fangirls, more long stories = more serious authors. Only few fangirls write really long stuff.

LotR has been written fifty years ago without a possibility for fans to publish or even to write their own stuff as easy as it is today. Nevertheless there still is a large number of authors dedicated to the Middle Earth Universe.

+++

 

First, let me tell you that I am well aware that this is necroposting.

But, instead of creating a new thread, I will resurrect this old one with the question...

Were our assumptions correct? Has Fanfiction begun to slow down, speed up, or only stay the same?

 

I haven't read a new fic since DH that wasn't a sequal...I would say the influx of DLP material has slowed down but I have no fucking clue as to the other shit.

 

Appart from IP82's one shot I have yet to read a post DH story. Most of the FF I read a stories that are post OOTP and have been around for awhile. I think there has been a bit of a surge in FF stories but most of them are short stories filling the gaps.

 

A whole bunch of little morons who use it as an excuse to officially abandon an already dormant fic. "Oh hai guyz, I rly h8 wut Rowlin did in DH, so I gunna stop writin, k?" Which particularly amuses me when I see people who are using that excuse to give up on full-series rewrites that are so far deviated that actually TRYING to use the last book would be almost impossible and so the sixth and/or seventh book has nothing to do with what they're writing.

 

There has been a slow-down in fanfiction. The golden age was post-OotP and post-GoF. Some post-HBP appeared, but now I swear, over half the things I see on FFN nowadays deal with the fucking kiddos. The other half deal with Albus/Gellert hawt luvvee. Bastards.

Seriously there were some major turn-points in HP fanfiction. When the short chapter appeared about the Marauders in OotP, the Marauder era fanfiction went insane. When an alien possessed JKR and declared Albus' undying love for his childhood friend we have a surge in Albus and Grindewald slash fanfiction. When the horcrux appeared in book six we had thousands of pages of horcrux hunting fics.

Our fandom is dying though. There have been very few Dark Harry stories coming out recently. A crusade must be taken to ensure our survival.