SOME MORE AWESOME THINGS I LOVED FROM THE HP FANDOM BACK IN THE DAY

Meta
Title:	SOME MORE AWESOME THINGS I LOVED FROM THE HP FANDOM BACK IN THE DAY
Creator:	are-are-kay/skarhead
Date(s):	12 Aug. 2015
Medium:	online
Fandom:	Harry Potter
Topic:	Harry Potter fandom circa 1999-2003
External Links:	post on Tumblr, Archived version
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SOME MORE AWESOME THINGS I LOVED FROM THE HP FANDOM BACK IN THE DAY is a fannish reminiscence by are-are-kay, posted to Tumblr on 12 August 2015.

Topics

• HP fandom from the publication of Prisoner of Azkaban to Order of the Phoenix (including the Three-Year Summer)
• fanon characterization
• common fanfiction tropes
• speculation
• common fan archives

The Post

SOME MORE AWESOME THINGS I LOVED FROM THE HP FANDOM BACK IN THE DAY

• between 1999 (PoA) and 2003ish (OotP) there were so many cool/ridiculous things about fandom that have been effectively lost to time and canon and i miss some of these things… for example

• literally 80% of everyone thought that Lily was gonna be a slytherin before it was specified. we LOVED it man, like, oh my god, what was harry gonna do when he figured out his own awesome mother was a slytherin who had defied voldemort

• the old fandom wank with cassie claire and all that shit was amazing guys look it up. (that’s the old fanfic author who writes the series about draco and ginny being in love, city of bones, now)

• oh my god the neverending war between the harry/hermione harry/ginny & draco/hermione shippers was AMAZING

• everyone used ff.net & LJ. then they all used fictionalley. these were the dark times before Ao3

• SIRIUS AND REMUS WERE BENT AS FRICK FOR EACHOTHER. FANDOM WENT INSANE IN THE MEMBRANE AT THE ‘JOINT CHRISTMAS PRESENT’ do you old timey wolfstar shippers remember that??!??!! good times. we were all CERTAIN jkr put that in there on purpose to give us some lgbtq representation we had so much faith in her

• in fact we thought about a BILLION characters were lgbtq+ and a ton of us were sure that jkr was gonna make harry some non-straight sexuality because of his confused grief-fumbling with cho. we had a LOT of faith in jkr and we were convinced she was gonna bring the represenation

• speaking of that, pretty much the only character we were sure was hetero was dumbledore. he was in love with Prof McG. awwwww. i mean grindelwald

• POC harry headcanons abounded… this era is where i got my headcanon that harry’s dad’s family in from India and i’ve kept it ever since

• seamus was hot an’ got around a lot

• lucius malfoy was the literal best humorfic character ever. and he always was fucking hilarious which was pretty sweet

• lots of snape/lucius shipping which i didn’t care about but again made for hilarious humorfic stuff

• snape was pretty much camp as fuck. of course this all got ruined now that he’s the ultimate whiny friendzone guy (which i still resent the FUCK out of btw i wanted him and lily to be a brotp that split when he got super racist and she started shagging his bully but who cares what i wanted) and he was soooo well dressed. and din’t look a bit like alan rickman. in fact, every one of the marauders era people was pretty much in their thirties. snape in vera wang. snape in designer women’s apparel. rockin that shit to the nth degree. SNAPE I MISS THE OLD SNAPE

• fuck how could i forget about campy voldemort (dragon tamer era, man-bag toting voldemort) he was the BEST- and we all had no idea what he was really gonna end up LOOKING like when PoA came out so the speculations were HILARIOUS

• everyone forgot that the canon series was currently taking place in the early 1990s and in fanfic we stuffed everyone into awful late 90s/early 2000s fashion. god it was so bad. this is where ‘draco in leather pants’ comes from but really it was like ‘draco and harry and everyone else except ron is from N’sync now and they dress just like that and everyone got their hair frosted yesterday”

• slytherins were Not All Bad but they were all Extremely Sexually Knowledgeable

• blaise zabini was often a girl

• Percy Weasley was a character that a lot of people actually cared about and remembered

• it was the best of times and the cheesiest of times, it was a land before horcruxes, it was a time without ‘always’, it was ‘the war is gonna be SO MINDBLOWINGLY HUGE AND GO ON FOR LIKE, LONGER THAN LoTR’ and ‘well, at least sirius and remus can take comfort in one another’…. it was the age of guns n’ handcuffs, it was the age of ‘marriage spells are forever’… it was good times, guys ♥