Hey Cassie! I know TMI was a Harry Potter fanfiction and i really want to know who the characters was in Harry Potter's world. Can you tell? You inspire me so much, i'm a brazilian ficwriter and is really awesome know that you started with fanfics. Thanks, love you.
The Mortal Instruments was not a Harry Potter fanfiction.
I did write Harry Potter fanfiction, that much is absolutely true. I understand that we live in a world now where people often “file the serial numbers off” their fanfiction and publish it with the names changed. Fifty Shades of Gray is the most famous example. After is another, and so is Beautiful Bastard, and you can find people talking about planning to file off the numbers and publish everywhere now. In every case those fanfics were an AU, or alternate universe, story. Edward Cullen is a billionaire, Harry Styles is a college student, Edward Cullen is your boss. I can’t swung a cat on the Tumblers without running across someone talking about pulling their Avengers AU high school fanfiction to change the names and publish it. (“In which Loki is a hockey player and Thor is a hockey stick.”)The publication of Fifty Shades of Gray has made this common and indeed it’s worth noting I never saw this rumor about TMI before 50 Shades was released.
Anyway, I did not write an alternate universe fanfiction. I wrote a story about Harry Potter who was sixteen years old and went to Hogwarts and visited Hogsmeade and lived in Gryffindor and had all the same friends and the exact same magic system with wands and Latin spell names and thestrals and what have you. I mean some things were different — Draco was in love with Hermione, etc. — but I could not possibly have turned the fanfic into anything publishable without stripping out the magic system and replacing it, changing the location, making all the characters completely different, changing their relationships, and changing the plot, because the fanfiction story I wrote (“Let Us Defeat Voldemort, Using Wands”) would not make any sense outside the realm of the Harry Potter universe.
I can’t answer your question, because none of the characters in Mortal Instruments are based on any characters in any fanfiction I ever wrote. When I have run across this rumor I have noticed people cannot even agree on which character they think was which. Simon is often Harry because he has glasses (Simon may also be Clark Kent.). Ron is Sebastian—eeesh, Ron, how could you? (I wrote Ron as a perfectly nice guy as far as I remember, it was a long time ago, but you’d think I’d recall him being the villain.) Alec is also Harry because, dark hair. Not sure how Simon and Alec are both Harry when they are nothing like him or each other but—go with me here! Clary is Ginny because she has red hair. They have nothing in common either but, you know, hair. Tessa is Hermione because she likes books. I don’t recall Hermione liking fiction, but hey, a female-shaped person who likes book-shaped objects, pretty rare, am I right? I mean, this is a game you could play with literally any book. “Percy Jackson is Harry Potter because they have black hair and green eyes and are heroes.” It is not how books work, though.
In a post-50-Shades world there is no harm in saying “My books are rewritten fanfiction” if they are, but — they are not. Having some jokes or the same sense of humor in common in two stories doesn’t make one thing based on another thing. It just makes them written by the same person. I understand why people want to think that it is true that The Mortal Instruments was once Harry Potter fanfiction — either because it is encouraging, if you like fanfic, or because it is a handy way to dismiss the books, if you don’t. It is, however, not true. I don’t even know how you’d get a book series about demons and angels and demon-fighters and seraph blades and alternate dimensions and Downworlder politics out of a fanfic based completely in the canon of Harry Potter (circa book four) that contained none of those things. As rumors go, this one is silly and harmless. But it is also false.
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