Harry Potter and the Quest For the Unfinished Volume
| News Media Commentary | |
|---|---|
| Title: | Harry Potter and the Quest For the Unfinished Volume |
| Commentator: | David D. Kirkpatrick |
| Date(s): | 05 May 2002 |
| Venue: | The New York Times |
| Fandom: | Harry Potter |
| External Links: | Harry Potter and the Quest For the Unfinished Volume - The New York Times, Archived version |
| Click here for related articles on Fanlore. | |
Harry Potter and the Quest For the Unfinished Volume is a 2002 article about the delay of the fifth Harry Potter book and the impact of this delay on Harry Potter fandom.
The article was published in the New York Times between book four and five in the Three Year Summer. It mentions Steve Vander Ark and the Harry Potter Lexicon and Heidi Tandy is quoted.
It was this article that prompted Warner Bros. to contact FictionAlley and offer the chance to become an "affiliate." See more at FictionAlley and Warner Bros..
Excerpt
Heidi Tandy, a lawyer in Miami who administers another Harry Potter Web site, said she believes the events of Sept. 11 played a role. In the fourth book, a set of characters called Death Eaters "resemble terrorists more than anything else," Ms. Tandy said. She guessed Ms. Rowling felt obliged to take recent events into account.
Thousands of teenagers and adults have attempted to fill the gap left by the delay in the fifth book with Harry Potter stories of their own, usually posted on Web sites and sometimes running to hundreds of pages. It took decades of "Star Trek" reruns to inspire a genre of "fan fiction," but just two years without a Harry Potter book.
Ms. Tandy helped start a Harry Potter "fan fiction" Web site, www.FictionAlley.org, and said its number of registered users had grown from zero to 4,000 in the last 10 months. In one popular story, Harry Potter and his schoolboy nemesis, Draco Malfoy, grow up to be gangsters and gay lovers in London. Ms. Tandy said her site tries to exclude children under 13 and avoids posting "X-rated" material. Other Harry Potter "fan fiction" sites are less strict.
Frustration with the delay among teenage and older Harry Potter fans online has often spilled out in feuds. Hard-core fans debate which characters will end up romantically linked. They call their rival camps "ships," short for relationships, and some partisan Web sites denounce or ban advocates of rival "ships."