The Eros Affair
| Challenge | |
|---|---|
| Name: | The Eros Affair |
| Date(s): | launched September 6, 2006? |
| Moderator(s): | Aja |
| Founder: | Aja |
| Type: | |
| Fandom: | Harry Potter |
| URL: | |
| Click here for related articles on Fanlore. | |
The Eros Affair was an invite-only Harry Potter fic challenge that ran in 2005 and then opened for public contributions. It was moderated by Aja.
The challenge was originally hosted on LiveJournal, but was moved to a private website due to explicit content.[1]
3rd Wave Was Never Completed/Completely Posted
It is unknown, though unlikely, that many 3rd Wave Fics were ever posted or compiled.
In April 2007, Aja made a post:
I apologize for the delay on responding to everyone's questions and concerns about the challenge. I was a bit overwhelmed with my own move off Livejournal, and I have been trying to process the different (limited) options for this community.
If LJ admins mean what they say, even linking to other sites with "underage" fanart material could be enough to prompt LJ to suspend journals here. This places many fandom communities in an extremely vulnerable position, this community among them.
I've asked the other community I actively owned and modded to put a moratorium on posting smut until such time as the community can be removed to another site. Obviously I cannot do that for the_eros_affair - it's a smut challenge. My first choice would be, obviously, to remain on LJ; however, I think it's obvious at this point that we cannot successfully run the challenge here.[2]
A fan in 2012 tried to recreate the content:
There was a prompt list, and over 50 people signed up to create fics and art. The first fic of the fest was dutifully posted on July 24, 2007 here (f-locked), and then so far as I can tell, the next thing on the site is an admin post from bookshop on August 13, 2007. She explains certain technical difficulties due to livejournal's policies and says the plan is to upload the rest of the fest's fics to a message board on her website. If this message board exists, I can't find it, or any links to the fics in any centralized location. (I did send an ask to Aja's tumblr account, as she seems more active there, but I haven't heard back.[3]
the fan received this response from Aja:
Hi! Of course, of course, I never got your Tumblr ask because Tumblr is the worst method of communication ever.2007 was a terrible time to run a challenge, haha. It seems like I made a wordpress site for posting to the eros affair at one point on my website but then later dreamhost changed something and the account broke. i basically utterly flaked out on this challenge; I just checked the gmail account and most of the fics are still there and the emails are unopened.
SO, some of these authors may have never posted their fics publicly anywhere. At least one of them posted independently but asked me not to archive them anywhere. So I'll probably need to try getting in touch with each of the authors if i can and compiling the links. Shoot me an email ( thesevenlines@gmail) and remind me? It'll take me a little bit, I've got some stuff on my plate through the rest of the month but I can work on this in a couple of weeks. Will that help? [4]
Some Links
- About (website)
- Notes (website)
- Cheque Scenario (website)
- Authors (website)
- LiveJournal site
- The Eros Affair, Second Wave (2005)
- Re-creating a Masterlist for The Eros Affair 3rd wave: Please Help
Descriptions by Aja
From Aja's professional portfolio:
"The Eros Affair" is a collaborative Harry Potter fanfiction challenge that ran in 2006. I designed the challenge concept, managed the collaboration, built the website, coded all content, and did the basic graphic design.
"The Eros Affair" project was part of the 2006 Collaborative Research and Media Practice critical study, a project of the Integrated Media department of RMIT University at Melbourne.[5]
From a 2015 interview:
I did this thing called the Eros Affair, where basically it was invitation only, where I got as many random people from the fandom around as I could get to, to do fics for this series of "love checks" that a friend of mine had sent me. Just sent me, totally out of the blue, and she had filled them all in with Harry and Draco, and these like little … yeah, the idea—
[snipped]
So it was formed as a gift for this girl who sent me these checks, and you can actually click on the "sex checks" and see an example of them.
It was just this arc, like basically she just sent me this gift out of the blue, and then she did her thing. She was actually going to Mount Everest—she was going to climb Mount Everest—I thought it would be really nice to do like a gift—kind of like a going away gift for her. And she started, you know, doing fundraising for it and talking about it well in advance, so I did this basically—like, sort of like six-month-long preparation—maybe even longer than that, maybe like nine months. Because it was a really long, sort of casual secret community where everybody joined and then they just sort of wrote the checks—basically wrote the their prompts that they had—.
Basically they had picked a check —. Everybody picked a love check, or a sex check, and they wrote stories about it. So everybody did that, and it got posted in 2006, and it was really cool, and everybody liked it. And then they ran it again, at least the community, the Eros Affair community, they ran it again, but I never got around to actually uploading anything to the site. (laughs) So oops. But yeah, that was fun, that was really one of the only other things that I actually moderated in H/D fandom I think. And the rest of the time I was either writing or posting meta. I did do the "the Draco", I wrote the—the essay—sort of like the definitive essay on Draco Malfoy, for idle reflection. And I say definitive just because it was the only one (laughs), not because it was like the best. But I tried to make it—and it was posted in like what, 2004, 2005? so I tried to make it as comprehensive as possible for like fandom meta and discussion up to date, up to that date. And, yeah, and then other than going to conferences here and there, like, I moderated a couple of panels for Nimbus and couple for panels for Phoenix Rising and Infinitus.[6]