[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

[hitokage]

Sorry to butt in but this -- And that's not even getting into the fact that she can't, actually, worldbuild a culture for shit, since she's a nice White English lady and since when have they ever had a culture to speak of? -- I may have to love you a little for this because YES YES YES. I've been feeling this SO MUCH for years, but everyone in my immediate circle seems to think she's a terrific world builder and I'm just like... but no?

[swingandswirl]

No worries! Fair warning, I actually have Theories about this and you've accidentally given me permission to spout them at you. Sorry in advance XD

everyone in my immediate circle seems to think she's a terrific world builder
Is your circle mostly American, by any chance? I ask because I've had American friends rhapsodise about how 'inventive' Hogwarts and the whole House system is, and I'm just sitting there dying laughing because Hogwarts is your bog standard British fancy boarding school with magic.

And I think the other major factor is that JKR is very good at funny names and clever little tricks of wordplay, which obscures the fact that the larger bones of her world-building - how the WW gets its food, how in the world they have a breeding population with one school, why we don't see any actual pureblood culture - just aren't there. It's like a building with absolutely gorgeous external details- stained glass windows, gold filigree on the roofs, the whole shebang- but then the damned support beams might as well be made of cardboard and candy floss.

[hitokage]

It is, though the school system itself is not usually cited as proof of her worldbuilding because apparently there's enough familiarity with Boarding School As Trope to know that? There are several non-Americans and also many Whovians, soooo. But it does feel like most of my (admittedly very small) circle is happy to point at the wallpaper and never notice the lack of sensible infrastructure. And with JKR now trying to expand her world outside the UK, that lack of serious thought to How Things Work, just... grinds my gears, so to speak. Like don't even get me started on how fundamentally broken the Fantastic Beasts movie is. Loved the story, but it's utter fantasy even beyond the use of magic.

[swingandswirl]

And with JKR now trying to expand her world outside the UK, that lack of serious thought to How Things Work, just... grinds my gears, so to speak.
If it helps, you're not the only one, and her lack of Serious Thought is pretty evident even within the British magical world itself. Like, why are English parents sending their kids to school in Scotland? Why is there only one school where Latinate magic is the only kind taught? (I mean, the answer there is imperialism, but I don't want it to be.) And that's not even getting in to how thoroughly borked the world-building is when you get out of the British isles.

I decided I was pretty much done with her when she declared there were only eleven schools of magic the world over, and one in Africa and none in India. The stupid, it burns us, precious.