H/D fic, post-OOTP. And how we aren't writing any.

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Title:	H/D fic, post-OOTP. And how we aren't writing any.
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Date(s):	October 4, 2004
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Fandom:	Harry Potter
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H/D fic, post-OOTP. And how we aren't writing any is a 2004 essay by Aja. The focus is writing smutty Harry Potter fanfiction.

It is part of a 2002-04 series of essays. See About Writing.

Excerpts

I've been thinking about the effect OOTP has had on the h/d section of the fandom as a whole, and the effect it has had on me as a writer. It's hard to be a writer who generates a fair amount of readers, because there's always a self-imposed pressure to, you know, not suddenly write something that sucks so that no one wants to read anymore; and it is hard to be a writer surrounded by incredibly talented writers, because there's always a self-imposed pressure to be as good as the writers you admire, to challenge yourself and grow and always move forward and produce something that proves you can still hack it with the best of them. But I think in my case the single biggest challenge has been OOTP. It's not that my faith in the pairing has steadily wavered since then; but my faith in being able to answer the questions raised by OOTP as a shipper has wavered.

I don't write well when I write cerebrally, and even if I write something badly, at least when I write from the heart, I don't care whether it's written badly. But it is hard to write from your heart when you are not convinced one of your characters can like the other anymore. :

Frankly, OotP left us in a real bind--not an insurmountable bind, but a real, immediate hindrance to the ship.

In my mind OOTP left the H/D shipper with two primary questions: how can Harry want Draco right now? and how can Draco forgive Harry for what he did to his father? I don't know if I have the talent to answer those questions. And I frankly haven't seen any other fics do it. It's not that I think H/D writers are any less talented now than before. It's just that H/D shippers aren't dealing with those questions.

Here's what shippers are doing instead: [see essay]

I have seen very few fics, if any, that I can say have really tackled the question of where Harry and Draco are right now, and what they are to one another right now--and how to lead them to each other starting from this point, not starting from a point in a future we create for them where they've both changed enough to make their relationship feasible.

As for me, I've only really written 3 fics since OOTP came out--Inscription, The Reader, and Trade; and all of them are attempts to deal with the question of where OOTP left us. All of them are highly unsatisfactory to me in that they all fall short in some way. I really do care about answering the question and finding a way to bring them together. And I think what frustrates me is not necessarily so much that I haven't found a satisfactory way to answer it, but that while I'm trying to answer it, in my clumsy, laborious method of not finishing anything I start writing, I feel like I'm writing in a vacuum--as if no one else is really trying to answer it either. Hell, I don't even know if I'm writing post-OOTP H/D well anymore, because I don't really have any other post-OOTP H/D fics with which to compare it.

I am not at all saying that I think writers who were in the fandom before are better than the ones that are writing fic now, or that the glory days of H/D are lost and gone forever. All I am saying is that GOF had everyone going crazy with building off of the H/D dynamic that the book ended on. That has not happened after OOTP. Ivy's post about how the ship is not dead notwithstanding, I cannot think of any fics out of all the ones I have read, that have really dealt with the question of how to start with OOTP, and end up with H/D.

I would love for anyone reading this to rec me an H/D fic that does.

And, if you can't think of a fic to rec me, then I have one challenge for you: write one.

Please.