[Fandom] Now I need to go re-read canon...

[jennaria]

...because I'm fairly sure that Harry Potter And The Half-Blood Prince is not actually about Harry's sexual awakening, featuring Draco, the aforementioned Half-Blood Prince, and possibly Ginny Weasley. (I told Wife this. She made the most interesting faces in response.)

In any case. I have now looked through ~500 pages of Harry Potter fanfic on AO3, and come to the following additional conclusions:

- Top AU: rewriting all of canon from the ground up, usually but not invariably sorting Harry into Slytherin. Also tends to peter out somewhere around the Triwizard Tournament. Second Most Common AU: Everything Changes After The Fire Nation Attacks Sirius Dies.

- It's fascinating to follow certain tags down a rabbit hole. 19 pages of 'Pureblood Culture' (but only 6 pages of 'Wizarding Traditions')! (And two and a half of those 19 pages are from one particular author who specializes in the kind of romance where it's super-shocking to brush your hair in front of someone who isn't your family or your fiance, and kissing someone, well. Abstinence porn in the finest Victorian tradition.) 9 pages of 'Wrong Boy-Who-Lived' (which usually involve Harry being a twin, and you can figure it out from there)! And 11 pages of 'Creature Inheritance,' wherein it turns out Draco is a Veela, Harry is a Dragon, and Snape really is a vampire after all. (I kid. Sorta. Not as much as I might be.)

- Also, wow, canon is over here and fanon is over there and I see those of y'all who are trying to bridge the gap, y'all are doing God's work, but it's a really big gap.

- Finally, you know that thing where you're reading a lovely rich WIP, and you get to the end and want more? And go check the Last Updated stamp and it's all 'ha ha this was uploaded from a defunct archive and hasn't been updated in over a decade'? Yeah. :hollow laughter:

Comments

[jenett]

I find the responses to the GoF gap so fascinating. (also, I am firmly in Camp "The Deathly Hallows subplot makes no sense.")

I worked out a lot of my issues with the canon via Alternity (which, y'know, if you want to be busy reading for a good while, there's a lot of stuff there. We got a lot better around Y2, and really hit our stride in Y4. Y1 was the shortest year in word and post count by far, so it goes fast.) Readable via journal entries, but probably easier by PDF - website over here has context, and PDFs for download and other links, and I am here for questions if people have them.)

More to the point, we had a lot of conversations in the process about what parts of canon we thought made absolutely no sense, which we liked, but needed modification, and which we wanted to run hard with. (We were universally on "The Deathly Hallows are a silly plot" and ignoring it, for the record. Complete with Monty Python noises in my head.)

On other recs: Lust Over Pendle and the sequels remain about an annual reread for me because I am apparently right here for manners novels with shennanigans and completely ridiculous magical theory.

[jennaria]

You could work with the Deathly Hallows subplot, you'd just need to plant it a lot sooner. Not have it come out of nowhere. (And I freely admit I'm working off of second-hand information. Thus the planned re-read of canon.)

Still need to download that! I tried reading it on the journals, and got very lost. And Lust Over Pendle I only know from mentions on fandom_wank, because Harry Potter fandom. :resigned sigh: