#hp het fics

[romaine2424]

Update to my MasterList of HP fics

Slowly but surely I'll get this project completed. I've added the other slash pairings and drabbles along with my Het pairing fics. Most of the latter are rare-pairs and some of my fav stories I've written. I mean seriously who doesn't like a very confident but morally questionable Draco with one very timid Professor Cho Chang. Probably the spiciest fic I've written. Or the very confident but morally questionable Minister for Magic Harry having an affair with Draco's wife, Astoria. Yikes! There's a missing canon moment for Draco/Pansy on the Hogwarts Express as they start their 7th year. Not romantic that one!

I actually haven't written many other slash pairings besides Drarry and Scarry, but a bit proud of doing an HPDH compliant Harry/Cedric. I'm still deciding whether to add my first fic I ever posted. I wrote it on a break from writing Double Edged Sword. It's Harry/Lucius. What was I thinking and what is that ship even called? Oh wait, I do have them in a drabble listed, too. It went away with the archived sites, but I still have an old copy.

Anyway, hope you enjoy the additions!

[consistentsquash]

Year of the Thestral has a new chapter update! Which is literally the hottest Snape het I have read in my whole life. I mean. Hot. Hot. Scorching. Intense. Confusing. Floundering. Brilliant brilliant sexposition/sex for exposition and characterization <3

He still radiated a tautness that could pass for strength, as was often the case with wiry folk who ran on coffee fumes, stubbornness, and the suffering of others.

110% Snape <3 @perverse-idyll love you <3

[lee-bella]

Non AO3 HP Fest Masterlists

AO3 seems to be down right now. (At least Fanfiction.net is still around—or we could always start writing.) Just for fun, here are some HP fest masterlists with fics and artworks hosted on Livejournal and/or Dreamwidth.

The Snape Showcase 2022 (LJ): Severus Snape through the ages.

Salt and Pepper Fest 2023 (DW): Focusing on characters over 50 years of age, in canon or not

Snarry-a-Thon 2023 (LJ | DW): Severus/Harry. A fest run by the snape_potter community on LJ and DW.

HP Bun in the Oven Pregnancy Fest 2023 (LJ | DW): All about pregnancy. The community also runs a monthly prompt challenge.

2023 HP Het Mini Fest (LJ | DW): Het pairings.

HoggyWartyXmas 2022 (LJ): A Christmas fest/party on Livejournal featuring Hogwarts staff and friends.

HP Halloween Double Drabble Exchange (LJ | DW): Bite size Hallowe'en tricks and treats. Here are some of the more recent rounds: !2020, !2019, !2018.

These fests have been running for many years. I've only linked their more recent rounds. Do check the tags on the sidebar for previous rounds.

And here are two older masterlist directories on Livejournal.

HP Master Lists: Just what it says. It hasn't been active since 2017, but it has plenty of masterlists from older HP fests.

Guns & Handcuffs: A Drarry community. It has a masterlists of H/D fests and challenges from 2004 to 2015.

There are many more older HP fests that were hosted on Livejournal, but it'll take a bit of digging around to find them. Or if you know where to find them, let me know.

[hpdrizzle]

Week Two Round Up.

[PODFIC]

Podfics for drizzle 2022 are not anonymous Title: Lovely Weather for a Sleigh Ride (Together With You) READ BY: roseszain | Author of Fic: Drarrelie Pairing: Draco Malfoy/Harry Potter Summary: The snow is glittering in the sun and the Eighth Years can't resist heading out to savour it, revisions and essays be damned. Only question is, can Harry coax his roommate to join them?

[ART+ FIC]

Title: Under the weather Pairing: Draco Malfoy/Harry Potter Summary: Harry Potter arrives on a Friday afternoon. Spring is beautiful this year, Draco thinks, and yet, there’s a dark grey cloud, rumbling ominously and leaving a big puddle right in the middle of the staffroom. The cloud appears to be right above Harry Potter’s head.

[ART]

Title: Mustelid Marauding Pairing: Hermione Granger/Draco Malfoy Summary: Hermione helps Draco speed up the animagus process, to join her in mustelid marauding.

[FIC]

Title: Raindrops and You Pairing: Luna Lovegood/Ginny Weasley Summary: Luna and Ginny let the rain wash away their past and lead them into a future unknown. Title: Think Of Me Fondly Pairing: Draco Malfoy/Harry Potter Summary: He spends his nights wrapped around Ginny. But the mornings, the mornings are for Draco. Title: Full Moon, Falling Snow Pairing: Sirius Black & Remus Lupin & Peter Pettigrew & James Potter. [GEN] Summary: The Marauders enjoy their first snowy full moon together. Title: spring rain in england Pairing: James Potter/Lily Evans Summary: There’s a small flood which makes James spiral a little. Fortunately, his wife is there to be the voice of reason. Title: Talk to the wind, talk to the sky Pairing: Remus Lupin [GEN] Summary: Remus had no idea if the storms or barometric pressure or whatever was really causing his migraine today, but he didn't care. Title: The Apokalypsis of (Flobber-) Wurm Pairing: Luna Lovegood/Theodore Nott/Harry Potter Summary: It’s raining flobberworms across Britain. Title: After All, What Are Friends For? Pairing: Hermione Granger [GEN] Summary: It's raining men at Hermione's house. Wizards are just showing up on her doorstep one rainy weekend, all making proposals of marriage. What IS going on? Title: Rain or Shine, You’ll Still Be Mine Pairing: Scorpius Malfoy/Albus Potter Summary: Scorpius hates the idea of being second place in the heart of his best friend. He hates even more that his emotions are so evident through the weather. Title: The Great King Rat Pairing: Barty Crouch Jr. [GEN] Summary: Barty Crouch Jr. is determined to solve the origins of the mysterious fog. Title: one more time again Pairing: Hermione Granger/Pansy Parkinson Summary: While grieving her mother, Hermione finds herself coming face to face with someone she never thought she'd see again.

[humanveil]

i didn’t do any of those end of year fic meme things cause i barely finished anything i started last year. but i had a look at what i did post & i think it’s sooo funny that these are my fave 2022 excerpts. duality of man etc etc but i feel like it tells you exactly how i approach both ships

[olderthannetfic]

As a proshipper Reylo is my worst enemy. I HATE it SO MUCH and I HATE that people say it's supposed to be healthy (imo it could be interesting if they leaned into how fucked up it was but anyway) It's so awful to me but like. *through gritted teeth* people can like what they like... it's fine... all ships are morally okay...

--

At least they leave each other kudos. I did a comparison of Star Wars fic at one point, and it was obvious that some shippers were pretty good about supporting fellow authors and some really were not.

My general feelings about Reylo are "Bleuuuurgh!" but the shippers seem fine for the most part, a few hustle culture types aside. One of my good friends is that sad breed of fan who only likes het but in the fanfic-centric way, and there isn't really a great space for that a lot of the time. That sounds insane, but if you think about it, a lot of het shippers are more canon focused, and a lot of extremely fic-focused fans and spaces aren't so interested in het. So she finds her spaces in some of the bigass ships like Reylo or, back in the day, the huge HP het ships.

[saintsenara]

Hey, I've been enjoying going through your takes on various hp ships, and I haven't seen this one. Did I miss it? What do you think of Ginny/Luna??

thank you very much for the ask, anons!

i've hinted at my views on linny in various places, but they don't yet have a dedicated post. so let's rectify that...

while i have a lot of time for the idea of both ginny and luna as queer, i'm sorry to say that linny is a victim of my general view when it comes to luna-centric pairings: that fics in which it's presented as something which works depend on the presence of fanon!luna, who is a beautiful clairvoyant ray-of-sunshine, rather than canon!luna, who is a stubborn conspiracist with the vibes of a golden retriever which can speak.

i don't doubt that ginny is incredibly fond of luna - nor that luna's positive characteristics [like her resilience, loyalty, kindness, and courage] must have been an enormous comfort to her while they're stuck at hogwarts with snape and the carrows - but her fondness always reads as the same sort of fondness you might have for a friend's precocious toddler. it's nice eye-rolling, but it's eye-rolling nonetheless.

which i think adds a slightly condescending element to their relationship which often gets left out of its portrayals in fanfiction, in both the platonic and the romantic sense. ginny and luna become closer just as ginny approaches her hot girl era [and, may i say, the implication of canon is that they're barely acquaintances prior to order of the phoenix, rather than childhood friends], and ginny's interest in keeping her around is evidently rooted in the fact that she views luna as unthreatening - her making luna take harry to ravenclaw tower in deathly hallows instead of cho always sends me, because she basically says "luna, you're unfuckable" and luna jumps up like "right you are!" - to her during her teenage peak. it's not exactly giving "christ, i think you're gorgeous"...

except, of course, that this doesn't matter in the slightest because this is fanfiction - the entire point is for two characters to be shoved together and made to realise they think the other is beautiful! i am perfectly amenable to the idea that linny can be written in which ginny and luna like and respect and are fucking obsessed with each other and which also feels coherent to both of their canon characterisations - and i love that for anyone who's a fan of the ship.

i just don't entirely think i am...

[there's also the... slightly discourse-y point, which is that linny often feels thrown into fics as a secondary ship as a way to enable a harry-centric slash pairing in a way which doesn't require the author to think about unravelling harry and ginny's canonical relationship.]

[i don't think there's anything wrong with this, per se - i break hinny up all the time, authors should be free to do whatever the fuck they want with their stories, not all fics need to do a completely canon-coherent wrangling with the canon couples they're breaking up in order to have their blorbos kiss, and i am increasingly uncomfortable with how some of the discussion i've seen recently pushing back, rightfully, on the misogynistic treatment of female characters in slash subfandoms is starting to sound a lot like "our canon het is pure and good and their non-canon slash is incomprehensible and wrong".]

[but i do nonetheless think it's worth being aware of a fandom tendency to make femslash relationships a throwaway line in order to enable m/m slash ones - and to think about how just smashing two female characters together without exploring how the relationship would align with their canon personalities doesn't necessarily help...]

[sitp-recs]

HP Rec Fest, Day 9

Rare pair galore, my moment has come!!! This is probably my favorite rec post so far. I mean, I’ve been reccing rare pairs for @hprecfest prompts already so I’ll take this opportunity to champion my favorite rare pair writers and focus on some niche ships that I would not even consider had I not stumbled across that particular fic. Idk how many people out there indulge het ships but if anyone’s looking for something steamy hot and well-written oh boy, do I have some treats for you. You’ll notice that most fics fall within the “problematique” category due to the age gap aspect (which let’s be honest, it’s the reason why I considered reading them in the first place 🌝). By the way, some of these are the only fics written for these ships, how cool is that?!

Day 9) A 5 rare pair fic (less than 2000 fics)

Opposite Ends by pauraque (Millicent/Aberforth, E, 1.5k)

She thought she'd feel different after they'd fucked. He's lived long enough to know that he wouldn't.

would never imagine these two together in a million years but omg so freaking hot 🥵 we have so little canon info on them but both povs are fascinating and full of personality

Gouge Away by tamlane (Millicent/Victoire, T, 1.7k)

The Weasley girl has developed a keen fascination with Millicent's woodworking shop. Millicent can't seem to get rid of her, no matter how hard she tries.

another surprising but quite charming pair, I love the set up and dynamics here - so much UST under 2k wow I need more wlw age gap!

Drip, Honey, Drip by tamlane (Lily Luna/Michael Corner, E, 3k)

Lily's boss catches her daydreaming on a Friday afternoon. He thinks there could be a business opportunity in it, and he wants to hear more. Sequel here.

this fic turned me on blew my mind! very original concept perfectly executed, the sexual tension is so dripping hot and intoxicating I thought I’d combust. the sequel is equally delicious, 10/10

testosterone (sounds like a spell) by pauraque (Justin/Hannah E, 7.7k) 🏳️‍⚧️

Justin never returned to Hogwarts after the Death Eaters came. He's found that the Muggle world offers other kinds of transfiguration — a body alchemy far more powerful than any magic spell. Sometimes he wonders if anyone even remembers that once, years ago, he was a novice wizard.

one of the best, most sensitive and moving trans stories I’ve read in the fandom. it’s such a privilege to follow Justin’s journey and I adore the way he clicks with Hannah. fabulous sex scene too

Burned Silk, Buckled Leather by @ruinsplume (Draco/Sirius, E, 12k)

When Sirius discovers a down-and-out Draco Malfoy lurking around the edges of a Muggle kink club, he thinks he knows just what Draco needs. He isn't expecting to run into some long-buried needs of his own.

my favorite Draco/Sirius out there, this fic has RP’s trademark: sinfully hot, tender devastating smut bringing together complex characters and many emotional layers beneath the surface. the kink exploration here is 👨‍🍳💋 mesmerizing!

[broomsticks]

fic length by fic type (category & ship): hp fandom stats

more statsy conversation in the @hpsaffics discord -- @siriusly-sapphic and I were wondering how fic length varied with popularity of ship. @toastystats' findings that het works tend to be longer than f/f and m/m came to mind, and I was reminded that I've been meaning to check if some of these v interesting findings are true for harry potter fic, specifically!

so anyway I did not do quite that but did something kind of related:

took the total number of works on AO3 (filtered for english only, no crossovers, wc>=1, and otp:true), sorted by word count, and clicked through to get the word count of the ~10th* percentile fic, ~20th percentile fic, etc etc)

(*full disclosure: i used google sheet formulas to get the page number and took the word count of the first fic on that page. so, nth percentile work +/- 20 works.)

"F/F only" = F/F -F/M -M/M &c

"excl. top10" = excluded the top 10 ships, "excl. top 20" = did that and then did it again, which IK may not precisely be the top 20 ships but hey. the most common ships left were Prongsfoot, Linny, and Tomione, at ~1k works each out of 78.5k.

this above is the master graph, zoomed in versions below because the scale of that graph is impossible to actually read

'smooth line chart' went a little wonky on that last graph but

seems like the het ships DO tend to have long fics. feels like sevmione has a ton of both long (>20k) fic and midlength fic, and dramione has a lot of midlength (5-10k) fic, and jily more ~1-5k fic.

snarry has a lot of unusually short fics (<500, <1k words) that drag down the bottom-most part of the chart, but there's proportionally a lot of >20k longfic too. wolfstar surprisingly has much less >50k work than the other two mslash ships! in fact wolfstar & snarry have some real interesting contrasts going on there.

HP femslash is noticeably shorter than other types of works, ~30% shorter than mslash at every percentile and almost half the length of het works. the catch-up to mslash at the 99th percentile (or, conversely, drop-off of mslash?) is intriguing though!

brief observation re. third graph: interesting -- in the mid range at least, wolfstar looks/behave a lot more like a 'rarepair' (anything excluding the top 10 ships) than drarry, snarry, or even "M/M -F/F -F/M".

[remember-before]

A Very Brief and Very Sectional Look At Fandom History With Reguards to Central Archiving With TK

Fact 1: We're starting with a time in fandom when I was 8 or 9

Fact 2: There are some amazing, extrmely well fact checked fandom histories already out there

Fact 3: The internet is forever and so are all your fandom sins.

Pre FF.N days were weird and rough. Star Trek had been the predominate fandom through the 70s, though fandom goes back hundreds of years (see: Sherlock Holmes). Pre 90s was the time of zines and cons and letters. Mid 90s, thanks to the now-much more common place home internet fandoms like DragonRiders of Pern flourished.

In the beginning, creators tried to be very involved in their fandom. Some, like Tamora Pierce were on the peripheral due to their fears of copyright issues (ie they'd accidentally borrow an idea from fans and then somehow need to credi them) and others, like Anne McCaffrey and Anne Rice were significantly more involved.

Redwall was my first fandom. While now I would never say there was a safe space for kids in the single digits to hang around online in, this was actually true statement then. Jaques had safe sites listed on his website and the fandom was a strong one. ITW (rip :(((() was still the primary message board system and most sites were hosted on netscape or angelfire. The death knoll for this fandom was the fall of ITW, there was just too much lore lost when it went down.

As Redwall waned, Anne Rice was cooking up her bullshit. There's some really well done Anne Rice Bullshit fanlore histories, but basically she used actual lawyers to send fans writing fanfic C&D letters and went after websites and fan content. It was horrifc. Some amazing people fled fandom forever, starting in about 1995. This picked up steam in 2000 when she absolutely wrecked her way through her own fandom.

Anne McCaffrey was, at the same time, on some other bullshit. She approved of and liked her fandom, but she was horrifically homophobic and if there was even a hint of gay anything, she'd throw a fit. She also didn't want anyone writing or RPing women in leadership roles (Bronze and Brown riders for those who read the books) and at some point in… 1999? She put a ban on it and would attempt to get your website taken down if they were rolled.

FFN started in 1998, which feels like it was late to the party. It started as an 18+ archive but by 2002 when the greatbreak happened (your sister is your aunt, hey fam) some ⅓ of their accounts self IDd as under 18. At some point they lowered their age to 13+ which is inline with industry standards.

Before FFN central archiving was done fandom by fandom. FFN didn't take this away. Some of these (SG1, LOTR, HP) were hosted on their own domains, but many were hosted on sites like Geocities (rip). Every time a service like ITW or geocities went down, a ton of fandom was lost forever. This was a high flux time, when fandom archives for even huge fandoms like HP were coming and going faster than you could upload your fics and each archive had it's own politics. What ships did they allow, what genres, what ratings… It varied based on who paid the bills.

FFN was a novel concept, and many fans flocked to it. Having a central archive? For all our fandoms? Glorious.

But what one must remember is that this was also a very weird time for media and the portrayal of gay people (mostly men). Anything involving a m/m relationship was basically two ratings higher than it would have been listed if the couple was het. Entire archives banned it (there was an epic two year long fandom battle in the HP fandom about including m/m relationships in archives not explicitly for m/m relationships).

Which of course led to most m/m fics having explicit or at least an R rating.

Several things happened in a quick timeline in the fandom world in the early 2000s.

1) LOTR came out and took over the known universe. And because there weren't a lot of women in LOTR, there were a lot more m/m fics suddenly. And movie studios were seeing that fandom was Big and Exciting and that Geeks Can Make Us Money. They attempted to put up a monetized website run by the studio to host fanfiction but once added to it, you lost all rights to your work and they could republish it, edit it, or utilize the idea however they wished without crediting you.

Needless to say, this went over like a lead balloon and their submissions were…. Choice.

2) FFN got sued or something and all of the sudden Xi cared A LOT about the content of their site. In september of 2202 they pulled all NC17 fics from their site, all RPS, and most m/m content. The NC17 and RPS stuff was sudden, just entire sections gone, but the m/m stuff was slower and more insidious. They had mods of a sort reading through fandoms looking for "violations" and pulling down fics, and the general public could flag your fic and have it yanked without review.

You can imagine how fandom used this exactly as intended and never used it against people they didn't agree with or pairings they didn't like. Somewhere in there FictionPress also started and all original stuff got yeeted to a new home. Adultff.n came into existence around the same time, but was not run by Xi, had the world's shittiest layout, and required archival permission at one point, meaning you submitted stuff for approval. It wasn't great.

Also let us not forget the MPAA sued them because their ratings are proprietary. Yeeeep.

(also note that search functions within categories didn't exist on FFN at the time, not even based on completion status, word count, or pairing)

This was the birth of AO3. I don't remember where the OG idea came about, but there was a whole lot talk about this idea on LJ. At some point, Brad sold us out to the Russians to Six Apart and LJ was lost, and while many platforms tried to capture the soul of LJ, it just never managed to do so. DreamWidth, Tumblr, JournalFen, etc.

Another thing to remember, is that fandom had been predominately male, even on IIRC days, but FFN and LJ fandom had become a predominately female fandom space. There  was an absolute ton of back and forth about this, written by a lot of people who were way more eloquent than I was in 2005, but there is a lot to be said about the regulation and pushback against spaces where men have to ask for a seat at the table, instead of being offered one. Remember that, for good or for bad, slash fanfic is predominately written by and consumed by female fans.

Which is where we come to today and the central archive we know and love that is AO3. And why when asked by AO3 allows ANYTHING GOES on their website, up to and including things you personally find immoral and DEAD DOVE, we have to recall that AO3 was built as we were being censored and fandom was being ripped from our hands. We have to remember that, at one point, just your basic slash pairing was being pulled down from sites because whoever hosted it didn't like The Gays.

We have a decently detailed history of all fandom kerfluffles from 2002-2015, many of which these incidents were involved in, on FandomWank. Many FandomWank details have been archived in wikis and other timelines. Some have not. Wild Award Mentions go to: LimeyBean, MrsScribe, HP Shipper Wars, WIKTT's Pawn2Queen wars, and anytime SPN ever got mentioned ever. But none are as great and incredible as the saga of Limeybean.

[consistentsquash]

HP Rec Fest - Day 4

Fest - @hprecfest

Theme - Fic with Art

Title - PS, I love you

Author + Artist - @my--witch, groot

Pairing - Snape/Hermione

Rec because - Nobody call a welfare check to my home because I recced Snape/Hermione. I got big reasons!

Reason 1 is @my--witch gets Snape! It really shows in her art!!!

Reason 2 is Snape gets laid.

Reason 3 is this is a really brilliant fic and art combo. Lots of humor, lots of plot, lots of postwar Ministry politics and drama! With an incredible earned happy ending!! This is the perfect art and fic for the season!

[dramioneasks]

Dramione News:

HP Cry Me a River Fest - Posting has begun, 1 dramione so far. :)

Dramione FanFiction Forum - Deflower Draco. Fest is complete, a masterlist will be posted soon!

Draco’s Den - #DenBingo23, Posting has begun, 2 dramione so far!!

HP Soulmates Twitter Fest - Signus open from Apr 1st - July 9th.

HP Drizzle - Prompting from Apr 23rd - May 5th.

HP Wedding Fest - Claiming open, fics due May 26th.

The Department of Missed Stories - Signups close Jun 21st.

Plot Bunny Adoption Fest - Prompting closes Apr 31st. Signups start Apr 31st as well.

Tales as Old as Time Fest - Claiming is open until June 30th.

HP ASD Fest - Fest runs from April to May 6th.

Dreomione Fest - Signsup are open, closes May 1st.

HP Fairy Tale Fest - Signups open from Apr 11th - Jul 8th.

HP Flowers - Fest runs all throughout May.

HP Het Fest - Prompting starts Apr 23rd, Claiming starts May 8th.

[hpdrizzle]

Week One Round Up.

[PODFIC]

Podfics for drizzle 2022 are not anonymous Title: Of Full Moons and Rain READ BY: Static_Whisper Author of Fic: Evening12 Pairing/Character: Remus Lupin [GEN] Summary: Remus’ life has taken on a routine that revolves around the full moon.

[ART]

Title: Swimming in the Rain Pairing: Draco Malfoy/Harry Potter Summary: Have you ever been swimming in the rain? Title: out of the blue clear sky Pairing: Draco Malfoy/Harry Potter Summary: The decision to propose to Harry is the easiest Draco’s made in his life. There was little doubt about how to do it, too - a message, four words written in neat cursive on a piece of expensive parchment, carefully folded into a paper crane (for old time’s sake, and because he knows it will make Harry laugh). It has been sitting hidden in his trouser pocket for days. Now there’s only the matter of finding the perfect moment.

[FIC]

Title: Nirmal Pairing: Cho Chang/Padma Patil Summary: निर्मल [Nirmal] (Hindi) — pure: (1) clean; e.g. The pure water of tropical, torrential rains. (2) complete, total; e.g. The pure joy of running and splashing in the downpour with a loved one. Title: Cozy Days Like These Pairing: James Potter/Lily Potter Summary: A snowstorm hits Godric's Hollow, but the Potters don't mind one bit. Title: Out of the fog Pairing: Harry Potter/Severus Snape Summary: As Severus desperately rushes to get Harry to St Mungos through the fog he considers their relationship. Title: Floating (with the melancholy storm) Pairing: Albus Severus Potter/Scorpius Malfoy Summary: Albus Potter is set to film the third season of the show he was starring in for a few years. Unexpectedly, Scorpius Malfoy cannonballs into his life to play his love Interest—and Albus floats with the melancholy storm, unable to discern the show from reality. (Kinda slow burn, kinda an open ending, kinda a lot of tension but it’s okay. It’s fine.) Title: Summer Changes Pairing: Draco Malfoy/Harry Potter Summary: Harry stumbles upon Draco Malfoy babysitting his godson, Teddy. He should probably stop dropping by every time Malfoy is there, but something about his former enemy still draws him close and makes his stomach flip. Now in an entirely different way. Title: Record Heat Wave, but the Greenhouse is Hotter Pairing: Neville Longbottom/Rose Weasley Summary: Rose Weasley didn't expect a record heatwave when she signed up to work in the Greenhouse at Hogwarts over the summer. She also didn't expect to shag Professor Longbottom. Title: The Winds of Change Pairing: Justin Finch-Fletchley/Ernie Macmillan Summary: All the big changes in Ernie's life seemingly had been prompted by a change in the wind.

[doubleappled]

Okay, lizards

I am turning off anon asks because someone — I am choosing to believe it’s just one person — keeps messaging me to say that they used to love my HP writing, and those fics were so creative and cool and interesting, but my current work is boring and pedestrian, and slash is good and het ships are bad (I’m paraphrasing; I delete these messages right away bc I don’t want to read them a million times and commit them to memory). I’ve gotten 4 of these messages in the last few months.

Please stop doing this! It! Makes! Me! Feel! Like! Garbage!

Because, hi, I am a person, not a content machine. And creativity isn’t linear; it doesn’t WORK LIKE THAT. At least not for me.

This is what I want to write, for now. If you don’t like The Bear and don’t like my new fic, please feel free to not read it! Unfollow, unsubscribe. It’s okay! You’re not into this fandom, and that is NOT hurtful. Even you thinking I used to be a good writer and now am not one — that isn’t hurtful to me UNLESS YOU TELL ME, SO PLEASE STOP TELLING ME.

I love the HP fandom. I got nothing but joy from it for many years, and I fully support the wildly talented people writing and creating art over there. I am not there right now. Someday I might go back! But it won’t be because someone told me I suck if I don’t!

We all get to write what we want and need to write. We can change and grow and change our minds and go forward and back. I feel defensive and this is ridiculous.

(Has anyone else experienced this? And anon, if you’re reading this, please walk away, seriously, because I’m tired of feeling bad about this.)

[olderthannetfic]

why do some popular things have such small fandoms, in your opinion? like, John Wick is incredibly popular but has less than 2k fics on ao3 and there doesn't seem to be a big fandom presence on tumblr. there's shows with 10+ seasons that have incredibly small fandoms as well.

i know not every fandom is going to be, say, Harry Potter or Supernatural levels (especially if it's an older show and fics have been lost to time- i've heard ER lost quite a lot) but it's just... odd to me, i guess.

--

The majority of things don't get fanfic fandoms.

There are some trends though. Certain genres are more likely to generate them than others. SFF is pretty likely. Crime dramas are reasonably likely, whether that's people slashing buddy cops on AO3 or lead canon het on FFN.

Incomplete-feeling canons are a bit more likely, usually due to plot holes or a crappy ending that people want to fix—but not so crappy that everyone just gives up in disgust.

Relatedly, things where the art part isn't too intimidating are more likely than ones where the big draw is that author's exact way of writing or the fantastically subtle and moving acting in some arty movie about social issues.

Serial media are way, way more likely to generate a fic fandom than one-offs, and having a certain number of hiatuses but not ones that are too long helps. You want some gaps where people have time to make stuff before it's instantly jossed, but you do need new canon to reinvigorate a fandom periodically.

Things just being well known by lots of people does help relative to a similar canon that few people saw, but exact audience size isn't the main factor.

Some tasty character dynamics help a lot. Maybe shippy, maybe more found family. A world that people want to play more with also helps. Even the gen-focused fandoms tend to care a lot about the latter two. They don't just write about any old canon. There have to be certain hooks.

--

John Wick does seem like it fits some of the standard criteria. There's more than one movie. It's fun, dumb genre stuff, not super high art.

TBH, having more than like 5 fics already means it's a success as a fic fandom, so part of it is just your frame of reference. I know you say you don't expect HP, but you should be expecting the norm to be way under 100 fics, not nearly 2k. That's part of it.

But I suspect the big reason is that a lot of people find the films relatively complete as-is.

They're set in the real world (-ish), so the setting isn't that interesting to explore with a bunch of OCs in the way that people write their own HP or Naruto casts. People like the lead, but I don't think they fixate on his relationships to other characters. (Checking AO3, it looks like some people are writing basically John/self, which makes sense.)

For much of the audience, it's all about watching him use a lot of guns. So many guns. All of the guns.

Once the big screen spectacle is done, I don't know that people really want more unless it's more action movies with more visual awesomeness.

IDK, I don't think I've seen any of these beyond some clips, so maybe I'm missing something.

[squibstress]

HP Rec Fest - Day 22

Prompt: An unfinished fic (hasn’t updated in 10 years or author stated it been abandoned) @hprecfest

A Long Vernal Season

Characters: Severus Snape, Poppy Pomfrey, Albus Dumbledore, Minerva McGonagall, Hermione Granger, and a cast of thousands of canon and original

Creator: MMADfan

Rating: MA/NC-17

Word Count: 637,259

Summary: A Snape-centric post-war fic.

Severus Snape had believed that, for him, life after the Dark Lord was an impossibility, that his death was not merely justice, but necessity. He has survived, though, and now he must learn to live his new, unexpected life, and to find something beyond the narrow existence to which he was once bound.

Not Deathly Hallows-compliant. DH-disregarded.

All early content rated T, but subsequent chapters may contain explicit sexual content, primarily het, suitable only for adult readers. Watch the individual chapter summaries and author’s notes for ratings, warnings, and the characters appearing in that chapter.

Part One finds Severus dealing with some very immediate and dangerous consequences of his final confrontation with the Dark Lord more than three months before.

Why You Should Check It Out:

The final, incomplete, story from the author's epic "RAMverse" series, this fic currently clocks in at over 600,000 words, so it scarcely matters that it isn't complete--it's a highly satifying read. Alongside MMADfan's signature world-building and OCs, this fic delivers the most compelling portrait of Severus Snape dealing with an unexpected post-war survival. He's muddled, confused, angry, grateful, (and very, very randy). He is trying very hard to make amends and become a different man--one who might even begin to enjoy life--but the regrets and scars of his past make it difficult. He finds help--and possibly redemption--in some surprising places. The plot contains twists and turns that aren't entirely resolved by the time the author apparently abandoned the fic, but it's fun to imagine how they might have played out. (And one can still hope MMADfan is around and will pick it back up eventually.)