The New Powers That Be: Harry Potter, the triumph of fandom, and the future of creativity.
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| News Media Commentary | |
|---|---|
| Title: | The New Powers That Be: Harry Potter, the triumph of fandom, and the future of creativity. |
| Commentator: | Laura Miller for "Slate" |
| Date(s): | September 11, 2015 |
| Venue: | online |
| Fandom: | Harry Potter |
| External Links: | Wayback |
| Click here for related articles on Fanlore. | |
The New Powers That Be: Harry Potter, the triumph of fandom, and the future of creativity is a 2015 article by Laura Miller.
Some Topics Discussed
- Harry Potter fandom and fansites
- a retraction that Carry On was not based on Harry Potter fanfic by Rainbow Rowell
- Cassandra Claire's beginnings in fanfic
- LeakyCon and Geeky Con
- FictionAlley
- Why Fanfiction Is Taking Over the World
Excerpts
Heidi Tandy still remembers the dread she felt the day in 2002 when she received an official-looking email from Warner Bros., the studio that produced the Harry Potter films. Tandy was one of the founders of FictionAlley, a website dedicated to Potter fan fiction. She’d first become involved in fan culture back in 1994, on an email listserv for Friends buffs. Like everyone she knew, she assumed that any communication from rights holders the Powers That Be, or TPTB in fandom lingo) meant a serious danger to her site—a cease-and-desist notice, or even a threat to sue.
However, as Tandy recalls in a collection of essays edited by Anne Jamison, Fic: Why Fanfiction Is Taking Over the World, it turned out that the studio’s representative had seen a front-page article about Pottermania in the New York Times and wanted to suggest that FictionAlley become an associate of the Warner Bros. store. Although this sounds like a perfectly mundane exchange today, that studio email marked a watershed. Fandom in all its forms, thanks in large part to Harry Potter, had become legit.
When she first got excited about Harry Potter in 2000, Tandy recollects, mailing lists and Usenet (an early form of discussion group) could be difficult for less internet-savvy people to access, especially because many fans tried to fly under the radar. “A lot of people thought being hard to find was important to fandom because if you didn’t, the Powers That Be would find out about you and shut you down,” Tandy said. Other groups shared fan fiction with adult themes and wanted to avoid exposing children to it. People who got very excited about, say, Star Trek were often met with ridicule and worse for their nerdiness, leading to shame or just an excess of caution when it came to talking about their taste.
It was the mass migration to LiveJournal by a significant portion of creatively inclined Potter fans in the mid-2000s that eventually led to the flourishing of networks that would transcend Harry Potter itself and foster the fledgling writers who would become the next generation of YA novelists. An early form of social media, LiveJournal combined a blogging platform with both a friending and a commenting system. You could use the site as it was originally intended, to keep and share a daily account of your thoughts and activities, but fan fiction writers also posted their stories there, and other members (depending on the account’s privacy settings) reviewed them; conversations and controversies blossomed. On LiveJournal, you could follow tags that kept you up to date on what other fans thought about the Harry Potter canon, but you could also follow particular writers, who in time developed fans of their own. The New York Times best-selling YA author Cassandra Clare started out writing Potter fan fiction before moving on to writing her own books.