Meh. The Dresden books are okay, but they ain't that good - or really have that much in terms of universal appeal.

 

Fixed that.

To go along with this discussion, what do you think are the elements of a story that makes it popular? For HP, I think it would be the large, believable cast, the tone (which is appropriate to the scenes) and an original world.

 

Honestly? I think it was mostly luck.

I'm certain that there are series - both old and upcoming - that have just as much potential as HP. But Rowling got the corporate machine rolling behind her stories, and the rest was history. Twilight is much the same - since I refuse to believe that Meyer has an inherently better vampire story, or that she's the first one to emasculate/romanticize/de-claw what is quite literally a blood-sucking monster.

Timing was important, as well. Late 90's/2000s was when it was in vogue for pre-teens and teenagers to have their own computers - computers that were much cheaper than they were for the Star Trek/Star Wars fanfic writers of old. Shit, if cheaper computers had been available in 1996, there probably would've been an equal amount of fanfiction written about Backstreet Boys and NSync...I know for a fact that my good friend's sister and her friends have stacks of marble composition notebooks filled with the stuff...

tl;dr: (luck) + (a reasonably malleable platform) + (ease of distribution) = fanfic explosion

 

As for the vampire stories: I read the original Dracula, watched the original black&white film + the Leslie Nielsen variation and thats it. I didn't have the stomach to watch or read the twilight books or movies. Naturally both are for different group of people but it's sickening how much the opinion of the media means today for the people. Back when I was younger I went to the bookshelf picked a book random and read it, but the teenagers today are only reading what they know is IT.

Few months back I was talking with a guy few years younger than me about what we read. I mentioned that I'm avid reader of sci-fi, so he asked about the writers whose work I read. So I began to list them Asimov,Lem... and thats where I stopped because I realized he had no fuckin idea who I was talking about.... Pathetic...

/rant

 

The first time I ever heard of fanfiction was from my older sister who used to read exactly that; Backstreet Boys and NSync. I used to make fun of her nonstop. Now she knows I read HP fanfic and tried to pull that same shit on me. On one hand you have fanfiction about what is already a book with fictional characters. On the other hand you have fanfiction about real (sorta) people who have real (sorta) lives. Fanfiction written/read by teenage girls who just want to sleep with boy bands is straight creepy. Even Twilight fics are better than that because at least that's already a fictional book.

 

Combination of several factors, I think.

1. So much stuff only alluded to leads to curiosity, which leads to people theorising, which leads to people writing their explanations/expansions of the world. Lots of fanfic is a platform by which an author gets to explore those things he wanted to see more of: magical theory, locations, people, past events, etc. Lots of this stuff was mentioned - flaring up imagination - but never described in detail, leaving it open for readers to fill in the gaps.

2. A fuckton of good divergence points.

3. Easy to write characters. One of the reasons why Dresden doesn't have as much fanfic is that the characters are much harder to write.

4. A relatively simple plot. Imagine all the crap you'd have to think about to make a divergence from Dresden canon. Harry Potter, on the other hand, is relatively simple. In Dresden, there are plots inside plots inside plots. In HP, there's a fairly obvious bad guy and a pretty straightforward path to take to get rid of him.

5. Popularity. Popularity meant that there were lots of people in the fandom. Fanfic, I think, grows on fanfic. Most people don't start writing fanfic until they've read a load of it. Without sufficient numbers to get the ball rolling, HP fanfic may never have got off the ground.

 

Twilight is successful because it managed to bring the vampire fantasy to teenage girls. That's pretty much it. Vampire books are disproportionately successful, probably because their readers are middle-aged dry-ups who haven't had a meaningful romantic/sexual encounter in a long time, so they're not really thinking on an objective level. Meyer just one-upped everyone with a family-friendly version.

I've always wondered whether this was because first person was generally harder than third person or simply because Butcher's narrative was so descriptive and distinct, while JKR's was so bland at times. Wrapping my head around Harry's feelings is a far more difficult exercise than any doing the same for any DF character.

 

Wow, I find myself disagreeing pretty strongly. I think Butcher is a much worse author than JKR in just about every way. The reason you can't get a handle on Harry's feelings is because he's written in a cliched mystery style where the main character knows a zillion things that the reader only finds out in bits and pieces. So he practically has no personality at all.

Although first-person POV can be harder to write than third, sometimes, the Dresden books have been like candy for me - not that good, but okay if I don't have anything better.

 

Wow, now I'm genuinely interested.Where exactly does JKR beat Butcher?

You know I mean Harry Potter right? Maybe it's because I haven't read HP in a while but I can't identify with Harry or his use of magic. I mean the series is Harry-centric to a fault but it never goes into his training, the feel of magic very deeply at all. And maybe it's because I like the fact that Dresden confronts his fears and his personality and I have an unrealistic view of the teenage mind.

Harry simply has a less distinctive personality than Dresden to me, which while making him easier to write and identify with in fanfic, completely fucks with me in first person because every single first-person Potter I've ever seen is OOC.

 

I think it's because JKR created a world where she mentions a lot of things (Unspeakables, the founders, animagi, veela, etc.) that are very interesting but never really explained in a great detail, b/c the majority of these ideas are just glossed over or never explained it allows individuals to expand on the authors idea while putting their own twist on the situation. Sadly, most authors suck and lack creativity.

The other reason I think HP Fandom has evolved the way it has is b/c a lot of us grew up with the characters. I for one had the books introduced to me in fifth grade, the teacher started to read us SS in class but stopped after a chapter b/c the school administration didn't want us reading about witchcraft in class, which got me hooked (reading it b/c it was "forbidden"), the last book didn't come out till the summer before I left for school, so I had essentially grown up with the characters, and when I wasn't satisfied with the way they were going I turned to FF.

 

I think most people turned to fan-fiction en masse after the release/reception of the sixth book.

Could you really blame them, though?

 

Consider how Ootp ended. With the whole "Power he knows not." That there spawned a huge genre, people imagining what that could do. I think played a role in the fandom exploding the way it did. That was so opened ended that it had thousands thinking of taking it and putting their own twist on it.

 

Yup. Fan thoughts went from all the way across the spectrum, from Necromancy to Technomancy.

 

Pre-HBP fanfiction is the most speculative era of fanfiction. A lot of the fics I read, detailing the 'war' between Harry and Voldemort come from that era, as well as a lot of the additions to the universe.

There's less of that now, methinks. But I must be looking at it through rose-tinted glasses because if I go back now and try to read another fic with an insanely overpowered Archmagus!Harry I'd probably kill myself.

Lol, look at us, nostalgic about the old days of the fandom.

"Back in my day, our Harry Potter had some zing, before the dark times,before the HBP...